LITERARY STATESMEN 

S^ OTHERS 
BY NORMAN HAPGOOD 



c 



<^ 



FTRo/i IP.f^P ^ 



\ 



'-^ii:.^0'of'rMn%'''^^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

'VS^^t^B 

Chap. Copyright No. 

ShelfJ^ll.L5 

^837 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

AND OTHERS 



Literary Statesmen 

And Others 
Essays on Men seen from a Distance 



BY 



NORMAN IhAPGOOD 




HERBERT S. STONE h CO. 
CHICAGO ^ NEW YORK 

M DCCC XCVII 




U 1 "^Ve >^ 

TWO COPIES RECEIVED 



COPYRIGHT 1897 BY 
HERBERT S. STONE & CO. 






^«^,t/ 



2084 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. Lord Rosebery 3 

II. Mr. John Morley 19 

III. Mr. Balfour seen from a Distance 43 

IV. Stendhal 69 

V. Merimee as a Critic 115 

VI. American Art Criticism .... 133 

VII. American Cosmopolitanism . . . 175 

VIII. Henry James 193 



LORD ROSEBERY 



LITERARY STATESMEN 
AND OTHERS 



LORD ROSEBERY 

Lord Rosebery, who has naturally been 
studied mainly as a statesman, appears, in 
the little he has written with an eye to 
literary form, as an artist of marked quali- 
ties, of talents which are high, although they 
do not combine into genius. A reader of 
the '' Life of Pitt," or of various addresses, 
or even of some of the poHtical speeches, 
must feel that the most significant element 
of the style is charm, composed largely of 
humor which is gay but not frivolous, of 
seriousness which is usually far from solemn, 
and of a taste which, never obtrusive, gives 
the suggestion of culture to every phrase. 

Of these elements the humor is the most 
individual, and so near akin to other qualities 
that it will bear dwelling on. It is never 
caustic, but friendly and pervasive, often even 

3 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

merry, altogether inspired by temperament. 
*' The son of the respected family physician, 
who had prescribed colchicum to the elder 
and port to the younger Pitt, Addington 
carried into poHtics the indefinable air of a 
village apothecary inspecting the tongue of 
the State." These words are spontaneous, 
real fun, expressing the overflow of a person- 
ality, not at all the studied wit of a clever 
man, and therefore not at all consistent with 
the popular notion that Lord Rosebery used 
to sit in his office in the House of Lords, in 
a chair tipped back, looking into vacancy for 
happy phrases. If he were seen in that oc- 
cupation the enjoyment would be greater and 
the effort less than a description of the atti- 
tude would suggest. " A strategist of unal- 
loyed incompetency and unvaried failure," 
although less expansive than the other quo- 
tation, has the true ring of fun in it. 

" * You should forget party/ said the Duke of 
Argyll. . . . The Duke of Argyll cannot forget 
his party, because his party is himself. Whatever 
may be your wishes, however noble may be your 
aspirations, when you have a party in that compact 
and singular, I might almost say that portable, form, 
it is one of which you cannot divest yourself, and 
it is one of which I think the Duke, on reflection, 
would be unwilling to divest himself." 

4 



LORD ROSEBERY 

In the same speech he said : — 

*' Now, if all hope of union has not fled before 
this, it is due, in my opinion, mainly to the patience 
of our leaders, who, when they have been buffeted 
on one cheek, have meekly offered the other. But 
I am bound to say this, that the time may come 
when we shall come to an end both of our patience 
and of our cheeks." 

It is only fair, since his treatment of humor 
is to be used as an indication of Lord Rose- 
bery's general character, to put in contrast to 
these expressions of easy and genial amuse- 
ment an example of his crudities, v^hich are 
extremely rare, and sometimes comical, in 
spite of their artificiality. " By a strange 
accident, he became the leader of the no- 
bility; but they supported him on their 
necks, for his foot was there." 

That humor may fairly be called a central 
point of Lord Rosebery's character is indicated 
by the kinship between that quality and the 
others in which he is attractive. Next to 
brilliancy of isolated perceptions, taste is the 
most essential element of humor, and Lord 
Rosebery's seldom errs. In his frequent 
references to art and literature there is no 
suggestion of pedantry. In his most earnest 
passages there is seldom declamation. Pad- 

S 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

ding of all kinds, repetitions, adjectives em- 
ployed to give sound, all the ordinary faults, 
are absent. There is no great subtlety, no 
pretentious paradox, no lack of calm and 
sure literary judgment. Dulness, above all, 
is a thing the writer abhors, even more, if 
possible, than grossness. In the " Life of 
Pitt," perhaps, of all the excellences the 
most conspicuous is a speed of style result- 
ing altogether from this avoidance of clog- 
ging or distracting errors, a speed which 
suggests not haste but clearness of thought 
and the restraint of culture, and is as 
noticeable in the comment as in the pure 
narrative. The felicity of phrase, although 
varying in degree, is always prominent enough 
to add to the faultlessness of the style a con- 
stant positive charm. " But these are like 
the wars of Marlborough and Turenne, — 
splendid achievements, which light up the 
epoch, without exercising a permanent influ- 
ence on the world ; to us, at any rate, the 
sheet-lightning of history." No single phrase 
could be found to give the quality of Lord 
Rosebery's half-humorous imagination better 
than this metaphor. His characterizations of 
persons, also, even when they are serious, 
have a dash allied to wit. " He charmed 
equally the affections of Carlyle and Fitz- 

6 



LORD ROSEBERY 

patrIck, the meteoric mind of Burke, the 
pedantic vanity of Parr, the austere virtue 
of Horner, and the hedgehog soul of Rogers." 
Any number of passages to show this pervad- 
ing, graceful, friendly irony might be found. 

" The uneasy whisper circulated, and the joints 
of the lords became as water. The peers, who 
yearned for lieutenancies or regiments, for stars or 
strawberry lesives ; the prelates, who sought a larger 
sphere of usefulness ; the minions of the bed-cham- 
ber and the janissaries of the closet ; all, temporal 
or spiritual, whose convictions were unequal to their 
appetite, rallied to the royal nod." 

Certainly these genial touches do not lack 
picturesqueness. They must please a culti- 
vated man with a combination of grace and 
vividness which comes just to the edge of 
imagination, near enough to borrow some of 
its attractiveness. It might be said, perhaps, 
that Lord Rosebery appreciates imagination, 
and has some of it, but is unable tc give it to 
his style. A passage coming as near to it as 
any is this : — 

" It was in Holland that his first complication 
arose. On that familiar board all the great powers 
of Europe were moving their pawns, — the fitful 
philanthropist, Joseph the Second, who had opened 
the games with his usual disastrous energy ; the old 

7 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

fox at Berlin ; the French monarchy, still bitten 
with the suicidal mania of fermenting republics 
against Great Britain ; and the crafty voluptuary of 
St. Petersburg." 

Lord Rosebery comes within sight both of 
literary and political imagination, and is kept 
from reaching them by traits which are at 
once his powers and his limitations. Taste 
and appreciation can take him no farther than 
this. Clearness and measure put him down 
at a point from which he should be carried 
on by emotion and will, if he were to add to 
the intelligence which he has the power which 
he lacks. Some passages reach nobility, 
none reaches grandeur ; many are persuasive, 
none is compelling. What is lacking is as 
necessary to a philosopher or a poet as it is 
to a man of action. It is easiest, perhaps, to 
see it as a moral weakness, although it is 
of equal importance from the aesthetic and 
the practical sides. It is a want of unity, 
of strong single feeling, of purpose. His 
perceptions, like his efforts, are unsustained 
and unrelated, lacking in concentration and 
therefore in force. There is honesty, frank- 
ness, generosity; there are convictions; but 
there is no single unifying conviction or con- 
ception, no faith, or passion, or need of ac- 
complishment. So it is that the more serious 

8 



LORD ROSEBERY 

the subject, the farther removed from the 
spectacular intellectual world, the nearer to a 
reality demanding action, the less adequate is 
Lord Rosebery in speaking or writing. As 
long as the tone is light, the unrelated bril- 
liant flashes, the frequent pleasant places, 
seem sufficient; but when the moral sense is 
aroused, when force and massing power are 
needed, impressiveness is called for. From 
the last citation, which was a success, it is but 
a step to others just as well written, but none 
the less, on account of their subjects, failures. 
Fairness, truth, and clearness, are pleasing 
always, but color and warmth, the inspira- 
tion of a character, are needed to make some 
ideas live. The political aspect of this very 
general truth has been stated, somewhat un- 
sympathetically, by Lord Rosebery himself: 

" Few supreme parliamentary speeches have per- 
haps ever been delivered by orators who have been 
unable to convince themselves, not absolutely that 
they are in the right, but that their opponents are 
absolutely in the wrong, and the most abandoned 
of scoundrels to boot, for holding a contrary opin- 
ion. No less a force, no feebler flame than this, 
will sway or incense the mixed temperaments of 
mankind." 

But that is only the more paltry side of the 
popular demand for a strong and lasting 

9 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

faith, and for devotion to Its requirements. 
Again Lord Rosebery speaks for himself: 
*' Fox could, indeed, lay down principles for 
all time ; but the moment the game was afoot, 
they ceased to govern his conduct." With 
this may be put his assertion that " the Eng- 
lish love a statesman whom they can under- 
stand, or at least think they can understand." 
What they sympathetically comprehend is 
rather earnestness and power than grace and 
neutral justice. After a paragraph in which 
he sums up the most Important Influences 
on Pitt's childhood. Lord Rosebery remarks, 
** All this does not amount to much ; " and he 
repeats identically the same phrase after talk- 
ing of Pitt's literary tastes. It Is not true ; it 
Is an expression of self-consciousness, and a 
small thing could hardly Illustrate more clearly 
the weakness of mere refinement, judged even 
by literary standards. 

To reconcile the assertion that Lord Rose- 
bery is serious with the assertion that his 
greatest failure is moral, would be to draw a 
line with exactness about his character. Not 
only is he gifted, refined, and elegant, but he 
has qualities more distinctly moral, such as 
courage and openness ; but these moral ele- 
ments are what might be called negative. 
His virtues are Inactive, and therefore depress- 

lO 



LORD ROSEBERY 

ing to most men. Like the famous creation 
of Buridan, he sees so clearly the reasonable- 
ness of opposite courses that he stands mo- 
tionless. It is easy to see a relation between 
the enthusiasm, the spirit, the self abandon- 
ment that are necessary to a moving style and 
the power of final decision in action ; and the 
literary as well as the practical defect is con- 
spicuous in Lord Rosebery. Nothing could 
make him commit a wrong. Not even popu- 
larity, which he likes, could lead him to 
speak a disingenuous word, or do the small- 
est act in which he did not believe. His 
speech at Edinburgh, after his resignation 
from the leadership, was strong in calm vera- 
city and generosity. It is easy to grow en- 
thusiastic in thinking of such virtues, and it 
is with sadness that one who is won as much 
by his integrity as by his culture sees how 
little these things avail to give greatness or 
importance when the possessor lacks moral 
authority. 

Certainly mere grace could hardly be more 
perfect than it is in the Edinburgh speech. 
What could have a better tone than the 
reference to the old leader who had just 
helped to show the world his protege's 
failure ? 



II 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

"Perhaps Mr. Gladstone has been the indirect 
cause, or the latest indirect cause, of the action that 
I have thought right to take, and to which you have 
alluded. But let none think that for that reason I 
have regretted his intervention in the Armenian 
question. It is now seventeen years ago since Mr. 
Gladstone came to Midlothian. I remember then 
making a speech in which I said that we welcomed 
the sight of a great statesman, full of years and full 
of honors, coming down at his advanced period of 
life to fight one supreme battle on behalf of liberty 
in Europe. Little did I think then that seventeen 
years later I should see a still nobler sight — a states- 
man — the same statesman — fuller still of years, 
and, if possible, still fuller of honors, coming out 
and leaving a well-earned retirement, which the 
whole nation watches with tenderness and soHc- 
itude, to fight another battle, but I hope not the 
last, on behalf of the principles in which his life 
has been spent." 

The cartoons show us Lord Rosebery 
quietly reading in his study, while the Arme- 
nians perish. Under the brutal exaggeration 
is the truth that in no emergency does he lose 
his literary interest, that it is his distinction 
and his limitation to be always in the artistic 
attitude. In this same speech, in one of its 
most earnest and significant passages, he can 
stop to give his hearers a piece of literary 
counsel : — 

12 



LORD ROSEBERY 

" Cromwell interfered, it is true, on behalf of 
people oppressed much as these Armenians are. He 
wrote, or rather he signed, some letters on that sub- 
ject, which were written by John Milton and signed 
by Oliver Cromwell, — an august conjunction, — 
which in their agony and vehemence of pathos still 
thrill our hearts across the generations that separate 
us. And, gentlemen, if this Eastern question has no 
other result than this to you, I hope it will make 
you betake yourselves to those sublime despatches." 

In prose, in short, Lord Rosebery is im- 
peccable. Seldom has he tried to leap be- 
yond this boundary ; but the one time I know 
of when he did endeavor to glorify his feel- 
ing and his language, to put into his words 
the color of poetry, he failed with pitiable 
completeness. When he tried to put ex- 
plicitly the deeper feelings, which to be con- 
vincingly expressed must be spoken in quite 
a different tone, he produced something of 
which it is hardly too much to say that, honest 
in feeling as it is, it is in the result mere 
declamation. 

" In this place, and in this day, it all seems pres- 
ent to us, — the house of anguish, the thronged 
churchyard, the weeping neighbors. We feel our- 
selves part of the mourning crowd ; we hear their 
volleys and their muffled drums ; we bow our heads 
as the coffin passes, and acknowledge with tears the 

13 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

inevitable doom. Pass, lieavy hearse, with thy 
weary freight of shattered hopes and exhausted 
frame ; pass with thy simple pomp of fatherless 
bairns, and sad, morahzing friends ; pass with the 
sting of death to the victory of the grave ; pass with 
the perishable, and leave us the eternal." 

There is no passion in all this, there is only 
calm observation, trying to speak a language 
more affecting than its own. It is not the 
real Rosebery at all. 

Or, rather, it is not the Rosebery his fairest 
admirers spontaneously think of. Their Rose- 
bery comes back to them when, in the same 
speech, he calls puff and advertisement " in- 
tellectual cosmetics," frail and fugitive, rarely 
surviving their subject. This is the laughing 
Lord Rosebery, easy, happy in wit and shrewd 
perceptions, pleasing gifts, and attractive per- 
sonality ; the man who in his boyhood is said 
to have planned out his future as a brilliant 
show, calmly deciding to be Prime Minister 
and to win the Derby; the statesman whose 
whole career has been an illustration of the 
futility in large action of a mind which in 
sport is so charming. What more natural 
than that his shrewdness and elegance should 
even trouble the average Englishman, should 
certainly be no compensation, since the aver- 
age Englishman is so much that Lord Rose- 

14 



LORD ROSEBERY 

bery is not? The average Englishman is a 
man of action, of unconscious poetry in senti- 
ment but of Httle artistic feeling, positive, 
prejudiced, and efficient. Lord Rosebery's is 
in an extreme degree the critical tempera- 
ment, and three doubters, as some French- 
man put it, do not equal one believer. The 
detached, sceptical, literary temperament has, 
as a rule, been distrusted by the masses ; and 
England as a whole, although it has followed 
men who enjoyed artistic pursuits as side 
issues, has never followed anybody in whom 
the artistic qualities were more prominent 
than the moral and active ones. The people 
do not admire a man who hates to move until 
he is convinced on logical grounds, any more 
than they admire in their intellectual world a 
thinker who has only rationality. Doubtless 
men of Lord Rosebery's kind, " corrective 
sceptics," help to increase culture ; but as in- 
dividuals they are seldom important in life or 
letters. "A constitutional statesman," says 
Bagehot, " is in general a man of common 
ideas and uncommon abilities." Of Lord 
Rosebery the reverse would be more nearly 
true. He has the virtues of the cultivated 
few, and lacks the abilities that alone can 
reach the many. 
1896. 

IS 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 



II 

MR. JOHN MORLEY 

Mr. Morley's interest to the observer is 
largely in his distinctness; for seldom is a 
man of importance so clear in outline until 
after his death, when time has wiped out de- 
tails and placed the individual. Mr. Morley 
has no details; he has no blurred edges, no 
puzzles ; he represents a famJliar type, and 
he is distinct, partly for that reason, partly 
because he is expressive in words, but in a 
large degree because, since few men of his 
kind rise so high, he stands apart in the spec- 
tator's eye alike from other British statesmen 
and from other English critics. To gain a 
position of influence in politics, and to assure 
himself a place in criticism, without the aid of 
instinct for action, charm of style, personal 
magnetism, wit, or eloquence, he has certainly 
kept his gifts employed at a higher rate of 
interest than is earned by most men of as few 
talents. His somewhat limited field has been 
cultivated with a thoroughness that has brought 

19 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

a larger crop than many a richer and broader 
area. In the moraHsm where we find so readily 
the boundaries of his personality we must find 
also a partial explanation of his accomplish- 
ment. The difference between him and many 
other critics caged in the straitness of their 
convictions lies somewhat in his intellectual 
mistrust of many of the qualities which limit 
him, which leads him to avoid some of their 
worst results and to get out of them as much 
as they can do. His clear-headed scholarship 
gains much from this check of his perceptions 
on his instincts, and so does his statesmanship. 
Mr. Morley's dozen volumes have given him 
a settled rank as a critic who is valued by the 
scholar as highly as by the general reader; 
and this rank is due largely to his moral 
nature, to the ethical seriousness which in 
its extreme is his artistic failure, — to his 
moral nature, which made his attention loyal 
to a few large facts and principles, and helped 
him to give order to all of his studies, at 
whatever sacrifice of vivacity. His misfor- 
tune is that these principles are not timely, 
that they do not form a message needed and 
welcomed by the times, like that of Matthew 
Arnold, for instance, or that of Ruskin, and 
of course also because they are not set in a 
style of distinction, but rather in one soured 

20 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 

by moralism and desiccated by science ; so 
that the row of books stand on the shelf of 
the temporarily useful merely, read because 
they give certain information more intelli- 
gently than any other summary treatises now- 
obtainable. *' Historia quoquo modo scripta 
est semper legitur." Mr. Morley himself 
finds history always interesting. He handles 
large subjects with a sincerity and a dignity 
that testify to their importance. 

Naturally such qualities show at their best 
in his larger books ; and the lives of Diderot, 
Rousseau, and Cobden are almost satisfying. 
In the first two Mr. Morley has allowed the 
subjects themselves to supply the elements 
of vividness and beauty in generous quota- 
tions, while he himself showed judgment in 
marshalling the surrounding facts. In the 
life of Cobden he dealt with matters well 
within the scope of his mind and tempera- 
ment, and no better work on the subject 
could be desired. The letters are connected 
by a narrative and comment written in their 
own spirit, which is Mr. Morley's in its 
general tone, while Cobden has the natural 
grasp of the concrete which Mr. Morley lacks, 
and lacks the power of abstraction which Mr. 
Morley has. In succinct narrative Mr. Morley 
is staccato and dry. He expands only in the 

21 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

region of the general, and there are conse- 
quently many dreary wastes in his poHtical 
speeches which are rare in his books. In 
the hfe of Rousseau he scolds a little, but he 
lets the man paint himself, as he does Diderot, 
while he as editor tells the most important 
things which these men brought into the world. 
These three books are the truest foundation 
of the writer's interest for the world, however 
much more discussion arbitrary and radical 
arguments like those in *' Compromise " may 
have aroused. The treatment may seem thin 
when we have read them all, but in reading 
them we can hardly fail to find constant food 
for the interest in serious principles of human 
progress which Pliny thought strong enough 
to make all history readable. They tell us 
almost nothing that is not worth knowing. 

Another superiority of these longer works 
is that the author's faults are less insistent 
in them than in the shorter political and lit- 
erary studies, to say nothing of the poHtical 
speeches, which will hardly enter into the 
judgment of the future. The first of these 
faults or limitations is that in no degree is 
history a picture to Mr. Morley, — it is merely 
a problem. The past is not brought before 
the imagination, except in some quotations ; 
it is only given, like a demonstration in 

22 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 

geometry, to the eye of reason. He him- 
self speaks in the hfe of Rousseau of " the 
greatest question that ever dawns upon any 
human intelligence that has the privilege of 
discerning it, the problem of a philosophy 
and body of doctrine." It is perhaps neces- 
sary to say of this judgment nothing more 
than that it is characteristic of its author not 
only in its sweeping generality but in its 
frank avowal of his own dominant interest. 
Mr. Morley has his own body of doctrine com- 
pact and unchanging, and other quotations 
will serve to show where it leads him. The 
scolding at religion; the irrelevant jeers, 
such as his suggestion that Hume's seasick- 
ness is -probably a satisfaction to the ortho- 
dox ; the famous small ** g," the translation 
in Goethe's poem of **das uebrige Gott" by 
** the master power ; " such violent speech 
inserted parenthetically as " the fatuous opti- 
mism which insists that somehow justice and 
virtue do rule in the world," — these little 
offences against taste are obviously part 
of a larger limitation. The sharpness of his 
partisanship not only makes his speech 
bitter; it makes breadth and sympathy of 
imagination on some aspects of literature 
impossible to him, just as in some of his 
speeches he seems to have thrown away 

23 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

moderation and the critical attitude, and 
become the mere advocate, endeavoring to 
gain force by violence and persuasion by 
contempt. So far does his own panacea 
carry him that he makes for it claims that 
in one who has so fiercely pointed out the 
exaggerations of the claims of revealed reli- 
gion and the slightness of the connection 
between belief and character are almost sur- 
prising : — 

" A man with this faith can have no foul spiritual 
pride, for there is no mysteriously accorded divine 
grace in which one may be a larger participant than 
another ; he can have no incentives to that mutila- 
tion with which every branch of the church, from 
the oldest to the youngest and crudest, has in its 
degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because the 
key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of 
every faculty, practical, reflective, creative, con- 
templative, in pursuit of a visible common good ; 
and he can be plunged into no fatal and paralyzing 
despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active 
faith in humanity, resting on recorded experience, 
discloses the many possibilities of moral recovery, 
and the work that may be done for men in the 
fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their 
burdens by manful hope." 

A part of this philosophy or creed is his 
constant preaching, in season and out, that 

24 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 

the social is the only worthy point of view, 
which naturally leads him to revel in the 
eighteenth century of France, since no period 
has had more greatness with less individuality, 
and no modern literature has as strong a 
social quality with such a dearth of original 
genius as the French. In his life of Diderot, 
Mr. Morley points out clearly how the par- 
ticular sympathies of the great Frenchman 
in art and letters are the natural result of 
his social point of view, — his liking for 
Greuge, for instance, and for Richardson. 
The remarks which Mr. Morley interjects 
on every opportunity about the family re- 
lations make a rather picturesque, perhaps 
a diverting, commentary on similar results, 
less artistic to be sure, from his own em- 
phatic social morality. In his Cobden is this 
judgment, in his sweeping manner : *' the great- 
est of political morals, that ' domestic com- 
fort is the object of all reforms.' " And in 
his Voltaire is this still more daring generali- 
zation: ''To have really contributed in the 
humblest degree, for instance, to a peace 
between Prussia and her enemies in 1/59) 
would have been an immeasurably greater 
performance for mankind than any given 
book which Voltaire could have written." 
From the same volume is an illustration 

25 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

which might be paralleled in almost any 
chapter Mr. Morley has written, for it is 
a belief so near his heart that it cannot be 
preached too much : " the general moral 
that active interest in public affairs is the 
only sure safeguard against the inhuman 
egotism, otherwise so nearly inevitable, and 
in anywise so revolting, of men of letters and 
men of science." 

Obviously this absorption in ethical stand- 
ards, in the directly social, leads Mr. Morley 
much farther than it could lead those more 
vivid imaginations which play freely and dar- 
ingly with many aspects of the world ; but 
it is hard to forbear giving one more example, 
because, detail though it is, it is so sharp an 
illustration that it is perhaps worth the space 
it takes. Everybody remembers with what 
scorn Mr. Morley attacked religious con- 
formity, however quiet, in his treatise on 
compromise. Is it not almost ridiculous 
after pages of biting reproaches to those 
who, for one reason and another, deem it 
best to keep their beUef to themselves, to find 
a passage telling us, in language which is its 
own comment on the effect of thought on 
style, in language which has at once the 
faults of the bar and those of that pulpit for 
which he has such a never silent contempt, of 

26 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 

the one case in which we are not to act on 
the principles which he has been laying down : 

"Where it would give them deep and sincere 
pain to hear a son or daughter avow disbelief in the 
inspiration of the Bible and so forth, it seems that 
the younger person is warranted in refraining from 
saying that he or she does not accept such and such 
doctrines. This, of course, only where the son or 
daughter feels a tender and genuine attachment to 
the parent. Where the parent has not earned this 
attachment, has been selfish, indifferent, or cruel, 
the title to the special kind of forbearance of which 
we are speaking can hardly exist. In an ordinary 
way, however, a parent has a claim on us which no 
other person in the world can have, and a man's 
self-respect ought scarcely to be injured if he finds 
himself shrinking from playing the apostle to his 
own father and mother. 

" If a man drew his wife by lot, or by any other 
method over which neither he nor she has any con- 
trol, as in the case of parents, perhaps he might 
with some plausibleness contend that he owed her 
certain limited deference and reserve, just as we 
admit that he may owe them to his parents. But 
such is not the case." 

With this truly ingenuous doctrine of the 
wife compare this little piece of rhetoric : — 

'"The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable 
puzzle of those who have no eye for the fact that 

27 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

such choice is the great match of cajolery between 
purpose and invisible hazard, with the blessedness 
of many lives for stake, as intention happens to 
cheat accident or to be cheated by it. When the 
match is once over, deep criticism of a game of 
chance is time wasted." 

It would hardly pay to go too deep into the 
conflicts of these two extracts, nor is deep 
search necessary to see in them some of the 
dangers into which the prophet who can give 
us solemn assurances in absolute form about 
the facts of our lives is likely to fall. Nothing, 
however, leads him into quite such impossible 
promulgations as these relations, which also 
lead him nearest to pure sentimentality in 
expression : — 

*' So sharp are the goads in a divided house ; so 
sorely with ache and pain and deep-welling tears do 
men and women rend into shreds the fine web of 
one another's lives. But the pity of it, oh, the pity 
of it!" 

It should be said, however, that this sen- 
sitiveness sometimes finds more pleasing 
expression : — 

" It is the bitterest element in the vast irony of 
human life that the time-worn eyes to which a son's 
success would have brought the purest gladness are 
so often closed forever before success has come." 

28 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 

Evidently it is in such cases as these not 
the thing said so much as the way of saying it 
that makes the weakness. If Mr. Morley had 
more appreciation of beauty, even if he had 
not the gifts to express it, he would avoid 
some of his softest moralizations. His pref- 
erence of the ethical to the aesthetic point of 
view is entirely conscious. *' I like the drab 
men best ; " and again : " Truth is quiet. . . . 
Moderation and judgment are, for most pur- 
poses, more than the flash and glitter even of 
the genius." The scientific and the ethical 
spirits have such complete possession of him 
that it is no wonder that when we read his 
Voltaire we see very little of the flash and. 
glitter of the genius. ** That he values knowl- 
edge only as a means to social action is one 
of the highest titles to our esteem that any 
philosopher can have." Then he has carried 
this line of thought so far that the definitions 
of art fixed by centuries of experience are 
undone to do homage to science : " tragedy to 
the modern is iiot TvxVy but a thing of cause 
and effect, invariable antecedent and invari- 
able consquent." The present reaction against 
the excessive claims of science is not without 
its analogies to the reaction against the preten- 
sions of revealed religion. Whatever tragedy 
may be to the fictitious individual here called 

29 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

the modern, invariable antecedent and invari- 
able consequent have yet to justify them- 
selves in the drama. In the novel they 
have done much, as they always have; but 
where is the play that has stood any test of 
time in which the point of view is not just 
the opposite, the strangeness of the powers 
that help or impede the course of man, — 
mystery, not the clearness of the scientific 
treatise? The wrongs done in the name of 
science have been no greater to religion 
than they have been to art and the criticism 

of art. 

Not the least of the evil results of letting 
science out of bounds is its injury to language. 
Mr. Morley's large vocabulary, the result of 
wide reading in several languages, is made up 
indiscriminately of words that are formal and 
lifeless, and words that have real blood in 
them. His imagery shows the same influence. 
In the following passage from the essay on 
Condorcet the ''less picturesquely" thrown 
in parenthetically from a mere passion for 
passing judgments is full of suggestion about 
the critic who threw it in ; but the quotation 
is made especially to show the chilling anti- 
climax of the non-conducting metaphor after 
the pictures which preceded it. 



30 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 

" * Cordorcet,* said D'Alembert, ^is a volcano 
covered with snow.' Said another, less pictur- 
esquely, * He is a sheep in a passion.' * You may 
say of the intelligence of Condorcet in relation to 
his person,' wrote Madame Roland, ' that it is a 
subtle essence soaked in cotton.' The curious 
mixture disclosed, by sayings like these, of warm 
impulse and fine purpose with immovable reserve, 
only shows that he of whom they were spoken 
belonged to the class of natures which may be 
called non-conducting." 

This lack of artistic feeling for language, 
which accompanies so naturally the cloud 
of moral judgments which checker all of 
Mr. Morley's writings, shows itself amus- 
ingly in single epithets. Turgot, whenever 
he is mentioned, however casually, is always 
** the great" or ** the wise Turgot; " *' justly," 
" admirably," ** rightly," are constantly stuck 
on to quoted judgments, with no other effect 
than to destroy the charm ; a swarm of things 
in the world happen " too often ; " unpleasant 
words like ** hateful " hover over the pages ; 
if the laxities of genius are mentioned, the 
English nation is immediately dubbed with 
an unpleasant adjective for its supposed cen- 
sures on the genius's conduct ; " only partly 
true " is fastened like an icicle on to an inter- 
esting quotation, — and so on as long as one 

31 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

chose to continue the task of showing speci- 
fically the evil wrought in literary execution 
by the subordination of artistic to moral 
sensibility. Mr. Morley is well able to see 
this truth in others. *' Macaulay's pages," he 
says, *' are the record of sentences passed, not 
the presentation of human characters in all 
their fulness and color." The moralist has 
his excuse for being and for writing, but it is 
a commonplace that the laws of art apply to 
his work also. 

One of the most curious manifestations of 
the moralistic spirit, more entertaining per- 
haps than displeasing, the confident dealing 
in superlatives, has already been mentioned, 
but the examples of it which Mr. Morley fur- 
nishes are so numerous and so extreme that 
the temptation to collect a few of them is 
irresistible. Voltaire is ** the greatest worker 
that has ever lived," *' the most graceful of all 
courtiers," and " the most trenchant writer in 
the world ; " his letters " are wittier than any 
other letters in the world," and his Akakia is 
" the wittiest and most pitiless of all the purely 
personal satires in the world." Cicero is ** the 
most eloquent of consuls or men," and 
Milton's Areopagitica is "the noblest de- 
fence that was ever made of the noblest of 
causes." 

32 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 

"The completeness of Catholicism as a self- 
containing system of life and thought is now harder 
for Protestants or Sceptics to realize than any other 
fact in the whole history of human society." 

" These transformations of religion by leavening 
elements contributed from a foreign doctrine, are 
the most interesting process in the history of truth." 

If we are tempted to ask what is the use of 
such infallibility, Mr. Morley can tell us by 
condemning the opposite, which he does, usu- 
ally sarcastically, with a persistence equal to 
his untiring statement of universals. He 
speaks of " the marvellously multiplying be- 
liefs of which we hear that they may be half 
right and half wrong;" and of "our lofty 
new idea of rational freedom as freedom from 
conviction, and of emanicipation of under- 
standing as emancipation from the duty of 
settling whether important propositions are 
true or false." It is not necessary to decide 
whether that lofty ideal is new or older than 
Eccleslastes, or whether or not it is wiser 
than its opposite, in order to dispose of the 
paradox sometimes put forward that Mr. 
Morley is at heart a Conservative, or of his 
own assertion that he is *' a cautious Whig by 
temperament." Does he or the nation which 
he scolds come nearest to deserving this 
diatribe : — 

3 23 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

" This inability to conceive of conduct except as 
either right or wrong, and, correspondingly in the 
intellectual order, of teaching except as either true 
or false, is at the bottom of that fatal spirit oi parti- 
pris which has led to the noting of so much injus- 
tice, disorder, immobihty, and darkness in English 
intelligence." 

The greatest of these limitations, the lack 
of a message, is perhaps what justified his 
turning his strength from literature to poli- 
tics, where his lack of beauty and of free play 
is a less absolute bar, where concentration 
and will can do more. The fixed principles 
without which he would never feel safe were 
required before he came near to concrete life, 
while he still saw things from afar; which 
marks him out clearly from the men whose 
principles seem to be imbibed unconsciously 
from the air about them, so that they become 
the spokesmen of some spirit of the time, 
changing often to express varying phases of 
the unseen forces that guide them. The far- 
reaching results in moulding issues, especially 
through his influence on a more creative per- 
sonality, are known ; but even in his steady 
onward march some of the same qualities 
that hold him back in literature show them- 
selves. An American philosopher, in conver- 
sation, once spoke with enthusiasm of Mr. 

34 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 

Morley's character. " I do not understand 
your ardor," answered a Liberal statesman. 
** He is a very sensible man, but he is a pessi- 
mist." Even when Mr. Morley tells us cheer- 
ful things, he does not cheer us. There is 
something dreary about his pictures of im- 
provements in the human lot. He has learned 
to talk more of good than of evil, but even 
when he scolds Mr. Lecky for pessimism 
there is something disheartening in his words 
of hope. That he should ever actually lead 
the nation is not easy to imagine, when we 
listen to a tone like this : — 

" It is the mark of the highest kind of union be- 
tween sagacious, firm, and clear-sighted intelligence, 
and a warm and steadfast glow of feeling, when a 
man has learnt how little the effort of the individual 
can do either to hasten or direct the current of 
human destiny, and yet finds in effort his purest 
pleasure and his most constant duty. If we owe 
honor to that social endeavor which is stimulated 
and sustained by an enthusiastic confidence in 
speedy and full fruition, we surely owe it still more 
to those who, knowing how remote and precarious 
and long beyond their own days is the hour of 
fruit, yet need no other spur nor sustenance than 
bare hope, and in this strive and endeavor, and still 
endeavor. Here lies the true strength." 



35 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

The moralizlngs of the man of action are 
short and occasional, and they are never reit- 
erated complaints against the whole nation 
which they lead. One example of this nether 
side of the moralist spirit in Mr. Morley must 
suffice : — 

" A community, in short, where the great aim of 
all classes and orders with power is, by dint of rig- 
orous silence, fast shutting of the eyes, and stern 
stopping of the ears, somehow to keep the social 
pyramid on its apex, with the fatal result of pre- 
serving for England its glorious fame as a paradise 
for the well-to-do, a purgatory for the able, and a 
hell for the poor." 

For the statesman who is content to take 
most of the faults of the nation and the race 
for granted, to offer no panacea but merely 
to do in a free spirit what seems best from 
day to day, Mr. Morley has still little respect, 
though more perhaps than he had when he 
spoke of " that sceptical and centrifugal state 
of mind which now tends to nullify organized 
liberalism and paralyze the spirit of improve- 
ment," which perhaps is not unlike his own 
in content, though with less storm and stress. 
Yet this very spirit, which takes the world 
artistically and serenely, often finds much to 
please it in the graceless but sterling com- 
batant. Nobody of intelligence would fail to 

36 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 

see Mr. Morley's attractions within the limi- 
tations of the species to which he belongs. 
His personality stands out as something real, 
something impressive. The same persistence 
that makes him talk forever against such fixed 
machinery as diplomacy, for instance, made 
him risk defeat to speak his belief on the eight- 
hour law. The faithfulness that made him 
thorough in his historical studies forced him 
into politics in middle life, because he could 
not preach one thing and do another. The 
declamation against book culture borrows 
a dignity when the declaimer bears up with 
such courage, after almost total failure, that he 
gains the ear of the nation. The world has 
one competent statesman more, and, instead 
of the hope that Mr. Morley's last literary 
work might surpass his first, it has the 
speeches and a few essays in which the old 
faults are missing, and with them the old 
virtues. There seems to be even less light 
in the struggle than at first; and the pursuit 
of the higher qualities of style is gone. Yet 
even from the literary standpoint we can 
hardly fail to be satisfied that he did what so 
few do, left his tastes to follow where his rea- 
son pointed. When we stand off and look at 
him in this generalized way, his faults are lost 
in the spectacle. The two characters of states- 

37 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

man and moralist, he has told us, " are always 
hard to reconcile, as perhaps any parliamen- 
tary candidate might tell us. The contrast 
between lofty writing and slippery policy has 
been too violent for Seneca's good fame, as 
it was for Francis Bacon's. It is ever at his 
own proper risk and peril that a man dares 
to present high ideals to the world." The 
inspiration for us in Mr. Morley's case is in 
the inconceivability of his failure to stand by 
his ideals. His arduous success marks out 
the superiority of the true scholar, who is not 
much out of place anywhere, while his par- 
ody the pedant, in Mr. Morley's own words, 
" cursed with the ambition to be a ruler of 
men, is a curious study. He would be glad 
not to go too far, and yet his chief dread is 
lest he be left behind. His consciousness 
of pure aims allows him to become an ac- 
complice in the worst of crimes. Suspecting 
himself at bottom to be a theorist, he hastens 
to clear his character as a man of practice by 
conniving at an enormity." No rational per- 
son doubts that he is speaking in the tone 
that most truly represents his deepest feeling 
when he says : " There are causes that de- 
mand and deserve fury and energy and the 
public is to be got at upon no other terms, — 
say Anti-Slavery, or Reform; and men are 

38 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 

properly adjured to strip off coat and waist- 
coat, charm or no charm." Certainly there 
is little of what is properly called charm, but 
a quality has developed itself gradually which 
perhaps comes nearer to it than anything 
else, — the tone of quiet sadness in which 
he sometimes sums up his new experiences, 
when he speaks of the failure of democracy 
to lead toward universal peace, or when he 
says : " It is one of the inscrutable perplex- 
ities of human affairs, that in the logic of 
practical life, in order to reach conclusions 
that cover enough for truth, we are constantly 
driven to premises that cover too much, and 
that in order to secure their right weight to 
justice and reason, good men are forced to 
fling the two-edged sword of passion into the 
same scale." 

John Morley's fanaticism, wrote James Rus- 
sell Lowell, '* is always exhilarating to me, 
though I feel that it would have the same 
placidly convinced expression if my head 
were rolling at his feet at the exigence of 
some principle." That judgment certainly 
strikes the key-note. Although lack of art 
or genius has followed Mr. Morley from let- 
ters into politics, although his love of abso- 
lute principle is in opposition to the spirit 
of a time that has no creed, the persistence 

39 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

which has helped him to escape failure and 
the straightness of his course make a picture 
that has some of the stimulus of the heroic. 
In spite of the distinctness of his qualities, 
their relative importance changes so readily 
with the mood of the observer that it is not 
easy to keep together appreciation of his 
worth and understanding of his limits. Low- 
ell, by the humorous choice of words, has 
been able to suggest the amusing in naming 
the impressive. On the one hand is the man 
whose writing is full of the perversities of the 
dogmatist and the closet philosopher, whose 
statesmanship lacks instinct and sensitiveness 
to facts that are too complex for statement, 
whose whole spirit seems thin and quarrel- 
some ; and on the other hand is the serious 
and rather sad thinker who has measured 
himself without vanity and taken the harder 
path from a sense of duty, who thinks he sees 
some changes that will make men happier, 
and who follows them without fear ; who took 
up his new fight not to complete his own 
experience but to obey that truth which ex- 
ists for him in a more tangible and discerni- 
ble, and perhaps in a more limited form than 
it does for most men of his size in our 
generation. 
1897. 

40 



MR. BALFOUR SEEN FROM 
A DISTANCE 



Ill 

MR. BALFOUR SEEN FROM A 
DISTANCE 

Although it is difficult to judge fairly from 
his books alone a man whose activity has 
taken many forms, the proverb that the style 
is the man is not an empty phrase. What 
the written words tell us is truth, though often 
not the whole truth. Though the traits picked 
out of the expression of abstract thought may 
not be the traits that would be prominent in 
the same man in action, in his social or politi- 
cal environment, they may be none the less 
intimately an outline of the whole personality. 
Many persons who have no opportunity to 
watch Mr. Balfour in Parliament, in society, 
in recreation; no opportunity to know the 
facts of his early training and of his present 
life, have by necessity been driven, when they 
wished to make more definite their idea of 
the picturesque young leader, to pick up sug- 
gestions in his books ; and of these many 
persons, a number get less from examining 

43 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

technically his system of philosophy than they 
do from looking with some minuteness at his 
habits of expression. 

To many a college student in America the 
name of A. J. Balfour, which he discovers on 
the shelves of the Department of Philosophy, 
is almost unknown. By a class of students 
which is in our larger universities consider- 
able in size, the discovery of a ** Defence of 
Philosophic Doubt" is almost invariably wel- 
comed with enthusiasm, as doubtless hereafter 
his later and more popular book will be wel- 
comed. The young student whose love of 
logic has made him a personal enemy of some 
of the present scientists is delighted at the 
trenchant style in which his newly discovered 
ally attacks the inconsistencies of the leaders 
of thought. Mr. Balfour does not make con- 
verts, but he gives welcome weapons to think- 
ers whose attitude is the same and whose 
strength is less. The young metaphysician 
who has not been able to crystallize his pre- 
judice into a critical system finds in the books 
of Mr. ]5alfour much help in stating reasons 
for his rejection of the various systems of 
philosophy, and thus, being able to accom- 
plish that necessary work, he is able, if other 
things are in him, to go on more quickly. " If 
speculations which do nothing but destroy 

44 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

seem to be, as indeed they are, unsatisfactory 
even from a practical point of view," says Mr. 
Balfour in " A Defence of Philosophic Doubt," 
** the reader must recollect that definite and 
rational certainty is not likely to be obtained 
unless we first pass through a stage of definite 
and rational doubt." 

A rational certainty, however, though it 
may be a good we get from Mr. Balfour, is 
not the one we go to him for. His readers, 
far from seeking the removal of difficulties, 
revel in them. The attraction is less in the 
final result of his thought than in the adroit- 
ness with which he exposes inconsistency in 
established thought. Naturally a youth of 
logical and critical bent, who has become 
irritated at the deference shown to men of 
more fertility than coherence, revels in a pas- 
sage like this : — 

"Looking back over the nineteen chapters we 
have been considering, and over the earlier half of 
the ' First Principles,' it is impossible not to regret 
that the ambition to produce a ' System of Philoso- 
phy ' should have forced our author into paths where 
his remarkable powers of mind show to compara- 
tively small advantage. Could he have been con- 
tent with giving to the world ' Suggestions toward 
a Theory of the Universe on the Basis of the Ordi- 
nary Scientific Postulates,' his astonishing faculty 

45 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

for collecting from every department of knowledge 
the facts which seem to tell in his favor would have 
had free scope, while his somewhat blunted sensi- 
bilities in the matter of difficulties and contradic- 
tions might have been of actual advantage. In 
trespassing on metaphysical grounds, the virtues 
which he possesses as a thinker — his extraordinary 
range of information and his ingenuity in framing 
original and suggestive hypotheses — become com- 
paratively useless, while the robust faith in his 
methods and results by which he is animated — 
necessary as I admit it to be in order that he may be 
sustained through his protracted labors — is from a 
speculative point of view an almost unmixed evil." 

Certainly such cutting summaries, in which 
he seems to rejoice in a vocabulary fitted to 
his critical acuteness, are from an artistic 
standpoint the best things he does. This, 
like his other powers, is more obvious than 
his defects, and it may be for this reason, as 
well as for the purpose of exhibiting an easy 
magnanimity, that the many reviewers who 
have attacked his results have passed off his 
literary qualities with a few words of praise. 
Yet the defects of his style, though less salient, 
are as undeniable as its merits. Indeed, in 
literary skill he is often so deficient as to 
surprise the reader who has a taste for close 
examination. 

46 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

Perhaps Mr. Balfour's highest literary merits 
may be roughly summarized as subtlety and 
originality. It is his subtlety in analysis that 
makes his satire, whether or not it is backed 
by conclusive arguments, go for a point at 
which it will hurt, and where it will be diffi- 
cult to parry. Although it is, for instance, 
possible to believe that there is progress in 
human understanding, and that this belief is 
final and needs no support, it is not easy, in 
reading the following dialogue, to avoid the 
feeling that the scientist is involved in a 
fallacy : — 

^^Evolutionist : However great the superiority of 
my views may be over those of my remote ancestors, 
or, indeed, over those of my contemporaries who 
are still under the influence of tradition, there is 
every reason to suppose that the causes which have 
produced this superiority are still in operation, and 
that we may look forward to a time when the opin- 
ions of mankind will bear the same relation to ours 
as ours bear to those of primitive man. 

^^ Inquirer : A glorious hope! One, neverthe- 
less, which would seem to imply that many of our 
present views are either entirely wrong, or will 
require profound modification. 

" EvohitioJiist : Doubtless. 

" Liqiiii'er : It would be interesting to know wJiich 
of our opinions, or which class of them, is likely to 
be improved in this way off the face of the earth. 

47 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

For example, is the opinion you have just expressed, 
that beHefs are developed according to law, — is 
that opinion likely to be destroyed by develop- 
ment? " 

Of course Mr. Balfour himself is not con- 
fused. No one knows better than he that, as 
some beliefs must be final, it is possible, with 
clearness at least, to take one's final stand 
on a belief in human progress. To say that 
progress may remove the belief in progress 
is simply to express a disagreement with the 
final assumption. It is Hke disagreeing with 
Mr. Balfour's belief in God. He believes in 
God because the belief unifies a number of 
other beliefs which, for working purposes, he 
wishes to hold. The scientist's belief in prog- 
ress has the same foundation. 

Although, however, Mr. Balfour can thus 
use his subtlety in support of an argument 
known by him to be unsound, he is even 
stronger in expression when he supports prin- 
ciples in which he believes. To say that 
these principles are negative is not to sug- 
gest any dislike of them. When the author's 
strong tastes are attacked as unprogressive, 
he resents the attack with a tu quoque argu- 
ment of such vividness that it comes nearer 
than anything else in his books to emotional 
power. Sometimes the thrust is delicate, as 

48 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

in this reference to Matthew Arnold's substi- 
tute for the established faith : — 

" There are those, again, who reject in its ordinary 
shape the idea of divine superintendence, but who 
conceive that they can escape from philosophic 
reproach by beating out the idea yet a little thinner, 
and admitting that there does exist somewhere a 
* power which makes for righteousness.' " 

Sometimes it is rough, even crude, especially 
when he speaks of the positivists : — 

*' Mr. Spencer, who pierces the future with a surer 
gauge than I can make the least pretence to, looks 
confidently forward to a time when the relation of 
man to his surroundings will be so happily contrived 
that the reign of absolute righteousness will prevail ; 
conscience, grown unnecessary, will be dispensed 
with ; the path of least resistance will be the path 
of virtue ; and not the * broad ' but the * narrow 
way ' will * lead to destruction.' These excellent 
consequences seem to me to flow very smoothly 
and satisfactorily from his particular doctrine of 
evolution, combined with his particular doctrine 
of morals. But I confess that my own personal 
gratification at the prospect is somewhat dimmed 
by the reflection that the same kind of causes which 
make conscience superfluous will relieve us from 
the necessity of intellectual effort, and that by the 
time we are all perfectly good we shall also be all 
perfectly idiotic." 

4 49 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

The Insertion of such sign-posts of irony as 
"excellent" consequences, "his particular" 
doctrine, and the pretentious final phrase 
which covers the venerable contention that 
the struggle with evil is necessary for intelli- 
gent life, is characteristic of his rougher satire. 
Though the satire is rather refreshing, even 
to one who laughs at it rather than at its ob- 
ject, it is hardly dignified, and it is a contrast 
to the style in which he expresses, with no 
enemy in mind, his own beliefs. 

Critics of his philosophy often assert that 
he has no beliefs. They charge him with 
insincerity, and attempt to prove the charge 
by showing him stating at one time one truth 
and at another its opposite. It is undoubt- 
edly easy to bring together passages on both 
sides of all of the philosophic controversies 
which he discusses. A striking contrast, for 
instance, might be made between his pictures 
of the bad effects of the over emphasis of 
science, and his explanations of the absolute 
impossibility of knowing what present tend- 
encies are for good and what for bad. It is no 
cause for wonder that some readers feel an in- 
consistency between the author's confident 
statements of the ultimate results that will fol- 
low from certain beliefs or from certain failures 
to believe, and such a passage as this : — 

5° 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

" The ceaseless conflict, the strange echoes of 
long-forgotten controversies, the confusion of pur- 
pose, the success in which lay deep the seeds of 
future evils, the failures that ultimately divert the 
otherwise inevitable danger, the heroism which 
struggles to the last for a cause predoomed to 
defeat, the wickedness which sides with right, and 
the wisdom which huzzas with the triumph of folly, 
— fate, meanwhile, amidst this turmoil and per- 
plexity, working silently towards the predestined 
end, — all these form together a subject the con- 
templation of which need surely never weary." 

Why, then, one might well ask, may v^e not 
look at the confused efforts of the scientist as 
an interesting part of this incalculable specta- 
cle, instead of quarrelling with him over some 
immediate consequences that we think bad? 
Of course the answer is really simple. Con- 
sistency, to quote Emerson, is a vice of small 
minds. The fact that Mr. Balfour's argu- 
ments do not all pull in the same direction is 
not an argument against, but for his sincerity. 
His desires and his beliefs are various. He 
likes to use his acuteness in pointing out the 
incongruities in the creeds of others, and he 
is aware, also, of the flaws in his own doc- 
trines, although, as part of the game, he pro- 
tects as well as he can the vulnerable points 
in his own creed. His insincerity is superfi- 

51 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

cial. He is perfectly frank with himself That 
he knows that his own vulnerable points are 
much like those of his adversaries, and covers 
this fact for forensic purposes, is no reason to 
doubt his earnestness. Though the talk occa- 
sionally made about his ardent faith by the 
orthodox persons whom he supports is some- 
what absurd, he has a strong sincerity of his 
own sceptical kind, — a sincerity as strong as 
that of any of his positivist opponents, and 
to one seeking the incongruous equally gro- 
tesque. Sincerity as a matter of temperament, 
of general attitude toward life, he has in abun- 
dance. Life to him is serious in a high degree. 
With any detail of it, a religion, a personality, 
a science, he deals lightly in some moods ; 
but toward existence as a whole he is never 
flippant; through all his doubt and satire is 
a genuine sense of wonder, interest, and igno- 
rance, a feeling of the complexity and awful- 
ness of life, — the feeling that gives dignity 
to the ablest sceptics. One feels this less in 
single passages than in the books as a whole. 
The reason for this is that Mr. Balfour's single 
passages usually show more his weakness than 
his strength. However, this sense of wonder, 
resignation, and powerlessness is frequently 
shown, sometimes with rhetoric, sometimes 
simply. It is seen less convincingly in his 

52 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

direct exhortations and statements of belief 
than in indirect ways, such as his tone in his 
appreciations of character, — especially his 
appreciation of noble men engaged in futile 
efforts. In such estimates, where it is not the 
fighter but the man of taste who speaks, his 
style loses its crudity, and gains a warmth and 
simplicity that touch the feelings and gain the 
approval of the reader who can take in the 
flights of militant rhetoric only an ironical 
interest. This side of Mr. Balfour is in the 
last part of this passage from his latest book : 

" Metaphysicians are poets who deal with the 
abstract and the supersensible instead of the con- 
crete and the sensuous. To be sure, they are poets 
with a difference. Their appropriate and char- 
acteristic gifts are not the vivid realization of that 
which is given in experience ; their genius does not 
prolong, as it were, and echo through the remotest 
regions of feeling the shock of some definite emo- 
tion ; they create for us no new worlds of things and 
persons ; nor can it be often said that the product 
of their labors is a thing of beauty. . . . Yet, in 
spite of all this, they can only be justly estimated by 
those who are prepared to apply to them a quasi- 
aesthetic standard. . . . For claims to our admira- 
tion will still be found in their briUiant intuitions, in 
the subtlety of their occasional arguments, in their 
passion for the Universal and the Abiding, in their 

53 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

steadfast faith in the rationality of the world, in 
the devotion with which they are content to live 
and move in realms of abstract speculation too far re- 
moved from ordinary interests to excite the slightest 
sympathy in the breasts even of the cultivated few." 

This passage illustrates what I called his 
second power, originality. He has generally 
most originality where he has least obvious 
subtlety. Originality in this sense is direct- 
ness of thought, freshness of point of view, 
individuality. To be original, said Goethe, 
is to say and do, as though it had never been 
done before, what many say and do every 
day. It is in his tastes, his enjoyments, and 
his sympathies, that Mr. Balfour shows most 
of this individual thought and feeling. The 
sympathetic picture of the metaphysician 
illustrates it. It is illustrated also, for in- 
stance, in his sympathy with the average 
man's motiveless curiosity. Of the many 
men who recognize that the consequences of 
an interest are not the only standard of ap- 
preciation, that there is the direct aesthetic 
standard also, few give an expression to these 
immediate values of more convincing sincerity 
than the expression of Mr. Balfour : — 

" We hear much of what is called * idle curiosity,' 
but I am loath to brand any form of curiosity as 

54 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

necessarily idle. Take, for example, one of the 
most singular, but in this age one of the most uni- 
versal, forms in which it is accustomed to manifest 
itself, — I mean that of an exhaustive study of the 
morning and evening papers. It is certainly 
remarkable that any person who has nothing to get 
by it should destroy his eyesight and confuse his 
brain by a conscientious attempt to master the dull 
and doubtful details of the European diary daily 
transmitted to us by ' Our Special Correspondent.' 
But it must be remembered that this is only a some- 
what unprofitable exercise of that disinterested love 
of knowledge which moves men to penetrate Polar 
snows, to build up systems of philosophy, or to 
explore the secrets of the remotest heavens. ... I 
admit, of course, at once that discoveries the most 
apparently remote from human concerns have often 
proved themselves of the utmost commercial or 
manufacturing value. But they require no such 
justification for their existence, nor were they striven 
for with any such object.^' 

This sympathy with a thing for itself, not 
for its consequences, is the one element of 
imagination that Mr, Balfour has. He lacks 
the creative, the expressive elements. He 
cannot give life to a character sketch, or pas- 
sion to an argument, although his sympathy 
with the logic of many points of view is keen. 
*' Argument is all I have to offer," he says in 
closing his " Defence of Philosophic Doubt." 

55 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

The phrase has the sound of grave resignation 
to a Hmitation. His arguments sometimes 
make us feel that the author has warmth, con- 
viction, sympathy. The warmth is for many 
things, excessive for none; the conviction is 
of the absolute values of certain temperaments 
and attitudes, apart from any outside standard 
of worth ; the sympathy is with the rational 
essence of a character, not with its details, its 
concrete embodiment. This personality, lack- 
ing as it is in brilliant colors, is one for which 
it is possible to have strong affection and deep 
respect, for it is earnest and it is individual. 
One may care little for Mr. Balfour's skilful 
force, and much for his breadth of sympathy 
and for the first-hand quality of his thought. 
The happiest illustrations of his personality 
in his style are in homely similes : — 

" Do they follow, I mean, on reason qua reason, 
or are they, like a schoolboy's tears over a proposi- 
tion of Euclid, consequences of reasoning, but not 
conclusions from it?" 

This is Mr. Balfour at his best, exact, ready, 
at once harmonious and grave, with a simpli- 
city of illustration well suited to his subtlety 
of distinction : — 

"... the right of every individual to judge for 
himself is like the right of every man who possesses 

56 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

a balance at his banker's to require its immediate 
payment in sovereigns. Tiie right may be un- 
doubted, but it can only be safely enjoyed on 
condition that too many persons do not take it 
into their heads to exercise it together. '^ 

Sometimes, though less often, there is the 
same fehcity in his more serious, or rather 
more solemn, expressions. The felicity is 
naturally rarer in expressing moods that are 
taken with effort. Religion, in the sense in 
which he defends it, is not an emotion with 
Mr. Balfour. He has not even a feeling of 
congeniality and companionship with it. He 
is only its protector. It is religion as a branch 
of aesthetics, and religion as a conclusion of 
logic, that are spontaneous interests for him. 
When he takes a high, solemn tone about it, 
he is flowery and stilted. It is when he talks 
with his native ease and irony that his fresh- 
ness, urbanity, and clearness appear : — 

" We do not, for example, step over a precipice 
because we are dissatisfied with all the attempts 
to account for gravitation. In theology, however, 
experience does lean too timidly on theory. . . . 
Because they cannot contrive to their satisfaction 
a system of theological jurisprudence which shall 
include Redemption as a leading case, Redemption 
is no longer to be counted among the consolations 
of mankind." 

57 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

Mr. Balfour is, then, at his best remarkably 
keen, apt, simple, and individual. Of the 
faults to be set opposite these merits the 
largest is effort. Not only is the argument 
often perfunctory and dry, but the rhetoric 
with which it is supported is forced ^md flat. 
Perhaps a satisfactory proof of this is in 
the last half of a passage which has been 
praised more than any other Mr. Balfour 
has written : — 

" Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to 
teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, 
the heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His 
very existence is an accident, his story a brief and 
transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of 
the planets. Of the combination of causes which 
first converted a dead organic compound into the 
living progenitors of humanity, science, indeed, as 
yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such 
beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit 
nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually 
evolved, after infinite travail, a race with conscience 
enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligence enough 
to know that it is insignificant. We survey the past, 
and see that its history is of blood and tears, of 
heljiless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acqui- 
escence, of empty aspirations." 

One of the most striking examples of his 
weak efforts for literary effect is in the middle 

58 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

of one of his most interesting passages. In 
speaking of Handel he is trying to suggest a 
quality, " the one most valued in modern 
art," which Handel lacks : — 

" Pathos hardly renders it ; for though it can 
hardly be cheerful, it need be impregnated with 
no more than the faintest and most luxurious flavor 
of melancholy. There is in it something indirect, 
ambiguous, complex." 

Thus far all is well ; but now comes an ab- 
surd statement absurdly illustrated : ** Though 
in itself positive enough, it is, perhaps, most 
easily described by negatives. It is not grief, 
nor joy, nor despair, nor merriment." Obvi- 
ously the statement that it is best described 
by negatives is put in to introduce the string 
of words in the next sentence. To say that 
this vague melancholy is not grief is well 
enough; it is not altogether absurd to say 
that it is not despair ; but the statement that 
it is not joy or merriment is born of the desire 
to make a sounding sentence. The rest of the 
exposition is done more intelligently : — 

" It is no simple emotion struck direct out of the 
heart by the shock of some great calamity or some 
unlooked for good fortune. If it suggests, as it 
often does, an unsatisfied longing, it is a longing 
vague and far off, which reaches toward no defined 

59 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

or concrete object. It is the product and the de- 
light of a highly-wrought civilization, but of a civili- 
zation restless and tormented, neither contented 
with its destiny nor at peace with itself." 

In beginning the explanation, Mr. Balfour 
thus prefaced his way : — 

" To describe this with accuracy, nay, to describe 
it at all, is scarcely possible. Even to indicate 
vaguely its nature is not easy ; since music, not 
literature, has been its chief exponent, and for these 
fine shades of sentiment language scarcely provides 
a terminology of sufficient delicacy and precision." 

It may make vivid Mr. Balfour's entire lack 
of strong and simple strokes in any writing 
but the ironical or the purely logical to com- 
pare all this mixture of sense and nonsense 
with a few words on the same subject from 
Turgenieff 's " Fathers and Sons " : — 

"But since I have just pronounced this word 
^ happiness,' I must ask you a question. Why, even 
when we enjoy music, for example, a fine evening, 
or a conversation with one who sympathizes with us, 
— why does the enjoyment appear to us an allusion 
to some unknown happiness to be found somewhere 
else, much rather than real happiness, a happiness 
that we are ourselves enjoying? Answer me. . . ." 

60 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

Taken even more in detail, Mr. Balfour's 
style shows a similar lack of firmness. To 
one who knows his history before he reads 
his books, it is a surprise to find ineffective 
words, faults of grammar, and awkward con- 
structions in his style. Not only his known 
interest in literature, but the quality of his 
thought when he analyzes politics, ethics, or 
persons, would lead one to expect from him 
an instinct for the structure of language, its 
technique. Yet his pages are full of the most 
elementary mistakes. These things are the 
more surprising that his style suggests much 
care and revision. This shows how little 
instinct he has for form in writing. There 
seems to be only one of the grammatical 
errors that usually come from a lack of liter- 
ary training that he avoids. He never uses 
the split infinitive. As this error, though less 
awkward and illogical than the mistakes Mr. 
Balfour makes constantly, has been more dis- 
cussed, his avoidance of it shows that he is 
willing to write correctly when he is told how, 
but that he is himself without the instinct. 

Allied to his incorrectness in construc- 
tion is a use of superfluous and weakening 
words. It is almost grotesque to find an 
explanatory ** rightly," "fortunately," or 

6i 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

"unhappily," wherever it can possibly be 
inserted. The frequent underscorings, and 
the absurdly numerous superlatives, are 
other similar weaknesses in his style. He 
seldom speaks long of any one without 
giving him a superlative of some kind. 

It is, perhaps, useless to argue that a 
multitude of small weaknesses of this kind 
have a marked effect on the power of the 
style as a whole. It is certainly seldom 
that a man so keen in criticism and so familiar 
with all the arts has had so few of the tech- 
nical merits and so many of the elementary 
faults of style. His sentences have none 
of the architectural elements of style. There 
is no force, no charm gained by the sound 
or the rhythm, no sonority or majesty. 
Therefore, there is no emotional force in 
Mr. Balfour's language, and no artistic at- 
traction. It is awkward, jerky, inaccurate, 
and inelegant. Of course it would be easy 
to deduce too much from this entire lack of 
taste in composition. It would hardly lead 
to truth to use the qualities of Mr. Balfour's 
style so radically as he himself uses the style 
of another writer: — 

" Shaftesbury is not, to me at least, an attractive 
writer. His constant efforts to figure simultane- 
ously as a fine gentleman and a fine writer are 

62 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

exceedingly irritating ; and the very moderate suc- 
cess which attended his efforts in the latter charac- 
ter suggests the doubt, justified by his later style, 
whether he can really have shone in the former." 

Of course that is absurd. Shaftesbury may 
or may not have been a fine gentleman, how- 
ever little relation there v^as between the 
pretensions and the actual value of his style. 
Mr. Balfour is certainly a man of the best 
taste in some ways; and the fact that he 
sometimes produces bombast, when he at- 
tempts to produce eloquence, is but a proof 
that his critical power, keen as it is, is 
limited in its range. Perhaps the most 
general judgment one draws from Mr. Bal- 
four's style is that what there is of the 
author is attractive, but that the personality 
is not a very large one. He says of 
Berkeley : — 

" Berkeley's early work is distinguished not only 
by the admirable qualities of originality, lucidity, 
and subtlety, but by a less excellent characteristic, 
which I can only describe as a certain thinness of 
treatment. At the time when he produced these 
immortal speculations he had read little and felt 
little. No experience of the weary entanglements 
of concrete facts had yet suggested to him that a 
perfect solution of the problem of the universe is 
beyond our reach." 

63 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

Mr. Balfour has seen the difficulties of facts, 
and he has read a good deal, but of the kind 
of emotion that makes strong literature he 
has known nothing. Like Berkeley's early 
work, his books are original, lucid, subtle, 
and rather thin. 

When Mr. Balfour's political career began 
we used to read ironical criticisms of him 
as a dilettante^ a literary man, a youth with- 
out vigor, loving music and art, incapable 
of stern practical work. He has now proved 
that it is in practical activity that his strength 
lies. His importance is neither in literature 
nor in philosophy, but in the field from 
which his tastes seemed at one time farthest 
removed. He has the power of dealing with 
the complex facts, guided partly by general 
theories, partly by instinct, — a power more 
interesting in him than in most statesmen, 
because there are few successful men of 
action who understand the instincts on 
which they act as well as Mr. Balfour under- 
stands his. He puts into practical politics 
a subtler, broader, more complicated intel- 
ligence than is usually found there, — a 
thorough scepticism, combined with thorough 
earnestness. His beliefs and his doubts alike 
strengthen him in this branch of his activity, 
though they are not beliefs and doubts that 

64 



BALFOUR FROM A DISTANCE 

form a great style or a great philosophy. He 
is an object of uncommon interest to many 
to-day, not because he is remarkable as a 
writer, a philosopher, an aristocrat, or a dilet- 
tante, but because he has become strong in 
pohtical action, with no loss of his less prac- 
tical interests. It is a rather singular figure 
that rises out of his books, — a character of 
much fineness and force, with general, broad 
fairness mixed with some strong prejudices; a 
mind without exuberant powers, though with 
rare keenness, interested always, and never 
excited. It is a mind of logic primarily, with 
little passion or sense of form. It is probably 
altogether a combination that exists seldom, 
if ever, outside of England, where the power 
of action has more often than elsewhere been 
combined with the temperament that looks 
out on the world as a panorama. It is in 
England that we see most often the uncom- 
promising critic of the final ends of life in the 
man who has the keenest taste for the battles 
about him, and the combination has seldom 
been seen in so striking a form as it can be 
seen in Mr. Balfour. 
1895. 



65 



STENDHAL 



IV 

STENDHAL 

The fact that none of his work has been 
translated into English is probably a source 
of amused satisfaction to many of the 
lovers of Beyle. Though he exercised a 
marked influence on Merimee, was wildly 
praised by Balzac, was discussed twice by 
Sainte-Beuve, was pointed to in Maupas- 
sant's famous manifesto-preface to "Pierre 
et Jean ; " though he has been twice eulo- 
gized by Taine, and once by Bourget ; and 
though he has been carefully analyzed 
by Zola, — he is read little in France, 
and scarcely at all elsewhere. While his 
name, at his death scarcely heard beyond 
his little circle of men of letters, has be- 
come rather prominent, his books are still 
known to very few. His cool prophecy 
that a few leading spirits would read him 
by 1880 was justified, and the solution 
of his doubt whether he would not by 1930 
have sunk again into oblivion seems now 

69 



•^to' 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

at least as likely as it was then to be an 
affirmative. " To the happy few " he dedi- 
cated his latest important novel, and it will 
be as it has been for the few, happy in 
some meanings of that intangible word, that 
his character and his writings have a serious 
interest. 

In one of the "Edinburgh Review's" 
essays on Mme. du Deffand is a rather 
striking passage in which Jeffrey sums up 
the conditions that made conversation so 
fascinating in the salons of the France 
of Louis XV. In " Rome, Florence, et 
Naples," published shortly afterwards by 
Beyle under his most familiar pseudonym 
of "Stendhal," is a conversation, with all 
the marks of a piece of genuine evidence 
on the English character, between the 
author and an Englishman; and yet a large 
part of what is given as the opinion of this 
acquaintance of Beyle is almost a literal 
translation of Jeffrey's remarks on the con- 
ditions of good conversation. Such a strik- 
ing phrase as " Where all are noble all are 
free " is taken without change, and the 
whole is stolen with almost equal thorough- 
ness. This trait runs through all of his 
books. He was not a scholar, so he stole 
his facts and many of his opinions, with 

70 



STENDHAL 

no acknowledgments, and made very pleas- 
ing books. 

Related, perhaps, to this quality, are the 
inexactness of his facts and the unreliability 
of his judgments. Berlioz, somewhere in 
his memoirs, gives to Stendhal half a dozen 
lines, which run something like this : — 

" There was present also one M. Beyle, a short 
man, with an enormous belly, and an expression 
which he tries to make benign and succeeds in 
making malicious. He is the author of a ' Life of 
Rossini,' full of painful stupidities about music." 

Painful indeed, to a critic with the enthu- 
siasm and the mastery of Berlioz, a lot of 
emphatic judgments from a man who was 
ignorant of the technique of music, who 
took it seriously but lazily, and who could 
make such a comment at the end of a 
comparison of skill with inspiration, as, 
" What would not Beethoven do, if, with his 
technical knowledge, he had the ideas of 
Rossini?" Imagine the passionate lover of 
the noblest in music hearing distinctions 
drawn between form and idea in music, 
with condescension for Beethoven, by a 
rnan who found his happiness in Cimarosa 
and Rossini. Imagine Beyle talking of 
grace, sweetness, softness, voluptuousness, 

71 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

ease, tune, and Berlioz running away to hide 
from these effeminate notions in Beetho- 
ven's harmonies! Imagine them crossing 
over into literature and coming there at the 
height to the same name, — Shakespeare ! 
What different Shakespeares they are ! 
Berlioz, entranced, losing self-control, feel- 
ing with passion the glowing life of the 
poet's words, would turn, as from some- 
thing unclean, from the man whose love 
for Macbeth showed itself mostly in the 
citation of passages that give fineness to 
the feelings which the school of Racine 
thought unsuited to poetry. "You use it 
as a thesis," the enthusiast might cry. 
" The grandeur, the wealth, the terror of it, 
escape you. You see his delicacy, his pro- 
portion, a deeper taste than the classic 
French taste, and it forges you a weapon. 
But you are not swept on by him, you never 
get into the torrent, you are cool and 
shallow, and your praise is profanation." 
Stendhal read Shakespeare with some direct 
pleasure, no doubt, but he was always on the 
look-out for quotations to prove some thesis ; 
and he read Scott and Richardson, probably 
all the books he read in any language, in the 
same unabandoned, restricted way. 

In painting it is the same. It is with 
72 



STENDHAL 

a narrow and dilettante intelligence that he 
judges pictures. The painter who feeds 
certain sentiments, he loves and thinks 
great. Guido Reni is suave; therefore 
only one or two in the world's history can 
compare with him. One of them is Cor- 
reggio, for his true voluptuousness. These 
are the artists he loves. Others he must 
praise, as he praised Shakespeare, to sup- 
port some attack on French canons of art ; 
therefore is Michelangelo one of the gods. 
The effort is apparent throughout ; and as he 
recalls the fact that Mme. du Deffand and 
Voltaire saw in Michelangelo nothing but 
ugliness, and notes that such is the attitude 
of all true Frenchmen, the lover of Beyle 
smiles at his effort to get far enough away 
from his own saturated French nature to love 
the masculine and august painter he is prais- 
ing. Before the Moses, Merimee tells us, 
Beyle could find nothing to say beyond 
the observation that ferocity could not be 
better depicted. This vague, untechnical 
point of view was no subject of regret to 
Stendhal. He gloried in it. *' Foolish as 
a scholar," he says somewhere; and in an- 
other place, "Vinci is a great artist, pre- 
cisely because he is no scholar." 

Add to lack of truthfulness, lack of thor- 
73 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

oiighness and lack of imagination, a total dis- 
regard for any moral view of life, — in the 
sense of a believing, strenuous view, — and 
you have, from the negative side, the gen- 
eral aspects of Stendhal's character. He 
was not vicious, — far from it, — though he 
admires many things that are vicious. He 
is not indecent, for " the greatest enemy of 
voluptuousness is indecency," and voluptu- 
ousness tests all things. The keen Duclos 
has said that the French are the only people 
among whom it is possible for the morals 
to be depraved without either the heart 
being depraved or the courage being weak- 
ened. It would be almost unfair to speak 
of Beyle's morals as depraved, as even in 
his earliest childhood he seems to have been 
without a touch of any moral quality. " Who 
knows that the world will last a week.^" he 
asks, and the question expresses well the 
instinct in him that made him deny any 
appeal but that of his own ends. Both 
morals and religion really repel him. It is 
impossible to love a supreme being, he says, 
though we may perhaps respect him. In- 
deed, he believes that love and respect 
never go together, — that grace, which he 
loves, excludes force, which he respects; 
and thus he loves Reni and respects Michel- 

74 



STENDHAL 

angelo. Grace and force are the opposite 
sides of a sphere, and the human eye cannot 
see both. As for him, he fearlessly takes 
sympathy and grace and abandons nobility. 
In the same manner that he excludes stren- 
uous feelings of right altogether, he makes 
painting, which he thinks the nobler art, 
secondary to music, which is the more com- 
fortable. For a very sensitive man, he goes 
on, with real coherence to the mind of a 
Beylian, painting is only a friend, while 
music is a mistress. Happy indeed he who 
has both friend and mistress. In some of 
his moods the more austere, the nobler and 
less personal tastes and virtues, interest 
him, for he is to some extent interested in 
everything ; but except where he is support- 
ing one of his few fundamental theses, he 
does not deceive himself into thinking he 
likes them, and he never takes with real 
seriousness anything he does not like. Ele- 
vation and ferocity are the two words he 
uses over and over again in explaining that 
Michelangelo alone could paint the Bible; 
and the very poverty of his vocabulary, so 
discriminating when he is on more congenial 
subjects, suggests how external was the 
acquaintance of Beyle with elevation or 
ferocity, with Michelangelo or the Bible. 

75 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

He has written entertainingly on such sub- 
jects, but it all has the sound of guesswork. 
These two qualities, with which he sums up 
the sterner aspects of life, are perhaps not 
altogether separable from a third, — dignity; 
and his view of this last may throw some 
light on the nature of his relations with 
the elevation and ferocity he praises. Here 
is a passage from " Le Rouge et le Noir " : 
"Mathilde thought she saw happiness. 
This sight, all-powerful with people who 
combine courageous souls with superior 
minds, had to fight long against dignity 
and all vulgar sentiments of duty." Equally 
lofty is his tone towards other qualities that 
are in reality part of the same attitude, — 
a tone less of reproach than of simple con- 
tempt. The heroine of " Le Rouge et le 
Noir " is made to argue that " it is necessary 
to return in good faith to the vulgar ideas 
of purity and honor." Two more of the 
social virtues are disposed of by him in 
one extract, which, by the way, illustrates 
also the truly logical and the apparently 
illogical nature of Stendhal's thought. It 
will take a little reflection to see how he gets 
so suddenly from industry to patriotism in the 
following judgment, but the coherence of the 
thought will be complete to the Beylian: — 

76 



STENDHAL 

" It is rare that a young Neapolitan of fourteen is 
forced to do anything disagreeable. All his hfe he 
prefers the pain of want to the pain of work. The 
fools from the North treat as barbarians the citizens 
of this country, because they are not unhappy at 
wearing a shabby coat. Nothing would seem more 
laughable to an inhabitant of Crotona than to sug- 
gest his fighting to get a red ribbon in his button- 
hole, or to have a sovereign named Ferdinand or 
William. The sentiment of loyalty, or devotion to 
dynasty, which shines in the novels of Sir Walter 
Scott, and which should have made him a peer, is 
as unknown here as snow in May. To tell the 
truth, I don't see that this proves these people 
fools. (I admit that this idea is in very bad taste.) " 

For himself, he hated his country, as he 
curtly puts it, and loved none of his rela- 
tives. Patriotism, for which his contempt 
is perhaps mixed with real hatred, is in 
his mind allied to the worst of all stupid 
tyrants, propriety, or, as he more often 
calls it, opinion, his most violent aversion. 
Napoleon, he thinks, in destroying the 
custom of cavaliere serviente, simply added 
to the world's mass of enmii by ushering into 
Italy the fiat religion of propriety. He is 
full of such lucid observations as that the 
trouble with opinion is that it takes a hand 
in private matters, whence comes the sad- 

77 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

ness of England and America. To this 
sadness of the moral countries and the moral 
people he never tires of referring. His 
thesis carries him so far that he bunches 
together Veronese and Tintoretto under the 
phrase, "painters without ideal," in whom 
there is something dry, narrow, reason- 
able, bound by propriety; in a word, inca- 
pable of rapture. This referring to some 
general standard, this lack of directness, of 
fervor, of abandonment, is illustrated by 
the Englishman's praise of his mistress, 
that there was nothing vulgar in her. It 
would take, Beyle says, eight days to explain 
that to a Milanese, and then he would have 
a fit of laughter. 

These few references illustrate fairly the 
instincts and beliefs that are the basis of 
Stendhal's whole thought and life. The 
absolute degree of moral scepticism that is 
needed to make a sympathetic reader of 
him is — especially among people refined 
and cultivated enough to care for his sub- 
jects — everywhere rare. I call it a moral 
rather than an intellectual scepticism, be- 
cause, while he would doubtless deny the 
possibility of knowing the best good of the 
greatest number, a more ultimate truth is 
that he is perfectly indifferent to the good 

78 



STENDHAL 

of the greatest number. It is unabashed 
egotism. The assertion of his individual 
will, absolute loyalty to his private tastes, 
is his principle of thought and action, and 
his v^ill and his tastes do not include the 
rest of the world and its desires : — 

"What is the ME? I know nothing about it. 
One day I awoke upon this earth ; I found myself 
united to a certain body, a certain fortune. Shall I 
go into the vain amusement of wishing to change 
them, and in the mean time forget to live ? That is 
to be a dupe. I submit to their failings. I submit 
to my aristocratic bent, after having declaimed for 
ten years, in good faith, against all aristocracy. I 
adore Roman noses, and yet, if I am a Frenchman, 
I resign myself to having received from heaven only 
a Champagne nose : what can I do about it ? The 
Romans were a great evil for humanity, a deadly 
disease which retarded the civilization of the 
world. ... In spite of so many wrongs, my heart 
is for the Romans." 

Thus, in all the details of his extended 
comparison, Beyle tries to state with fairness 
the two sides, — the general good and the 
personal, the need of obedience to its rules 
if some general ends of society are to be 
attained, and the individual's loss from 
obedience. He states with fairness, but his 

79 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

own choice is never in doubt. He goes 
to what directly pleases him: — • 

" Shall I dare to talk of the bases of morals ? 
From the accounts of my comrades I believe that 
there are as many deceived husbands at Paris as at 
Boulogne, at Berlin as at Rome. The whole differ- 
ence is that at Paris the sin is caused by vanity, and 
at Rome by climate. The only exception I find is 
in the middle classes in England, and all classes at 
Geneva. But, upon my honor, the drawback in 
crmiii is too great. I prefer Paris. It is ^ay.'^ 

His tastes, his sympathies, are unhesitat- 
ingly with the Roman in the following 
judgment : — 

" A Roman to whom you should propose to love 
always the same woman, were she an angel, would 
exclaim that you were taking from him three quar- 
ters of what makes life worth while. Thus, at 
Edinburgh, the family is first, and at Rome it is 
a detail. If the system of the Northern people 
sometimes begets the monotony and the cn?tui that 
we read on their faces, it often causes a calm and 
continuous happiness." 

This steady contrast is noted by his mind 
merely, his logical fairness. His mind is 
judicial in a sort of negative, formal sense; 
judicial without weight, we might say. 

80 



STENDHAL 

He does not feel, or see imaginatively, 
sympathetically, the advantages of habitual 
constancy. He feels only the truths of the 
other side, or the side of truth which he 
expresses when he says that all true pas- 
sion is selfish; and passion and its truth 
are the final test for him. This selfishness, 
which is even more self-reliance than it is 
self-seeking, which has his instinctive ap- 
proval in all moods, is directly celebrated 
by him in most. The more natural genius 
and originality one has, he says, the more 
one feels the profound truth of the remark 
of the Duchesse de Ferte, that she found 
no one but herself who was always right. 
And not only does natural genius, which we 
might sum up as honesty to one's instincts, 
or originality, make us contemptuous of all 
judgments but our own ; it leads us (so far 
does Beyle go) to esteem only ourselves. 
Reason makes us see, and prevents our act- 
ing, since nothing is worth the effort it 
costs. Laziness forces us to prefer our- 
selves, and in others it is only ourselves 
that we esteem. 

With this principle as his broadest gener- 
alization, it is not unnatural that his pro- 
foundest admiration was for Napoleon. I 
am a man, he says in substance, who has 
6 8i 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

loved a few painters, a few people, and 
respected one man, — Napoleon. He re- 
spected a man who knew what he wanted, 
wanted it constantly, and pursued it fear- 
lessly, without scruples and with intelli- 
gence, with constant calculation, with lies, 
with hypocrisy, with cruelty. Beyle used 
to lie with remarkable ease even in his 
youth. He makes his almost autobiograph- 
ical hero, Julien Sorel, a liar throughout, 
and a hypocrite on the very day of his 
execution. Beyle lays down the judgments 
about Napoleon, — that he liked argument, 
because he was strong in it; and that he 
kept his peace, like a savage, whenever 
there was any possibility of his being seen 
to be inferior to any one else in grasp of 
the topic under discussion. It is in his " Life 
of Napoleon " that Beyle dwells as persist- 
ently as anywhere on his never-ceasing 
principle, — examine yourself; get at your 
most spontaneous, indubitable tastes, de- 
sires, ambitions; follow them; act from 
them unceasingly; be turned aside by 
nothing. 

It is possible, in going through Beyle's 
works for that purpose, to find a remark here 
and there that might possibly indicate a 
basis of faith under this insistence, a belief 

82 



STENDHAL 

that in the end a thorough independence of 
aim in each individual would be for the good 
of all; but these passing words really do 
not go against the truth of the statement 
that Beyle was absolutely without^ the moral 
attitude; that the pleasing to himself imme- 
diately was all he gave interest to, and that 
of the intellectual qualities those that had 
beauty for him were the crueller ones, — 
force, concentration, sagacity, in the ser- 
vice of egotism. But here are a few of the 
possible exceptions. "Moli^re," he says, 
in a dispute about that writer's morality, 
"painted with more depth than the other 
poets. Therefore he is more moral. Noth- 
ing could be more simple." With this 
epigram he leaves the subject ; but it is 
tolerably clear that he means to deny any 
other moral than truth, not to say that the 
truth is an inevitable servant of good. If 
it did mean the latter, it was thrown off at 
the moment as an easy argument; for his 
belief is pronounced through his works, 
that his loves are the world's banes, and 
that any interest in the world's good, in 
the moral law, is bourgeois and dull. Here 
is another phrase that perhaps might suggest 
that the generalization was unsafe: "He is 
the greatest man in Europe because he is 

83 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

the only honest man." This, like the other, 
is clear enough to a reader of him; and it 
is really impossible to find in him any iden- 
tification of the interesting, the worthy, with 
the permanently and generally serviceable. 
Where the social point of view is taken for 
a moment, it is by grace of logic purely, for 
a formal fairness. A more unmitigated 
moral rebel, a more absolute sceptic, a more 
thoroughly isolated individual than the 
author of " Le Rouge et le Noir " could not 
exist. Nor could a more unhesitating dog- 
matist exist, despite his sneering apologies ; 
for dogmatism is as natural an expression of 
absolute scepticism as it is of absolute faith. 
When a man refuses to say anything further 
than, "This is true for me, at this moment," 
or perhaps, "This is true of a man exactly 
such as I describe, in exactly these cir- 
cumstances," he is likely to make these 
statements with unshakable firmness. This 
distinctness and coherence of the mind 
which is entirely devoted to relativity, is 
one of the charms of Stendhal for his lovers. 
It makes possible the completeness and the 
originality of a perfect individual, of an 
entirely unrestrained growth. It is the kind 
of character that we call capricious or 
fantastic when it is weak; but when it is 

84 



STENDHAL 

strong, it has a value for us through its 
emphasis of interesting principles which 
we do not find so visible and disentangled 
in more conforming people. The instincts 
which in Stendhal have such a free field to 
expatiate seem to some readers rare and 
distinguished, and to these readers it is a 
delight to see them set in such high relief. 
This, in its most general aspect, is what 
gave him his short-lived glory among the 
young writers of France. They hailed him 
as the discoverer of the doctrine of relativity, 
or as the first who applied it to the particu- 
lar facts they wished to emphasize — the 
environment and its influence on the indi- 
vidual. This has been overworked by great 
men and little men until we grow sad at the 
sound of the word; but it was not so in 
Beyle's time, and he used the principle with 
moderation, seldom or never forgetting the 
incalculable and inexplicable accidents of 
individual variations. He does not forget 
either that individuals make the environ- 
ment, and he is really clearer than his suc- 
cessors in treating race-traits, the climate 
and the local causes, individual training, 
and individual idiosyncrasies, as a great 
mixed whole, in which the safest course is 
to stick pretty closely to the study of the 

85 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

completed product. For this reason Zola 
very properly removed him from the pedes- 
tal on which Taine had put him, for what is 
a solvent of all problems to the school for 
which Taine hoped to be the prophet is in 
Stendhal but one principle, in its place on 
an equality with others. Zola's analysis of 
this side of Beyle is really masterly ; and he 
proves without difficulty that the only con- 
nection between Beyle and the present nat- 
uralists is one of creed, not of execution — 
that Beyle did not apply the principle he 
believed in. The setting of his scenes is 
not distinct. Sometimes it is not even 
sketched in; and here Zola draws an illus- 
tration from a strong scene in " Le Rouge et 
le Noir," and shows how different the setting 
would have been in his own hands. Beyle is 
a logician, abstract; Zola thinks himself 
concrete, and concrete he is — often by main 
force. This is a sad failure to apply the 
doctrine of relativity to one's self. Beyle 
errs sometimes in the same way, and some of 
his attempts at local color are very tiresome, 
but on the whole he remains frankly the 
analyzer, the introspective psychologist, the 
man of distinct but disembodied ideas. He 
recognized the environment as he recognized 
other things in his fertile reflections, but he 

86 



STENDHAL 

was, as a rule, too faithful to his own prin- 
ciples to spend much time in trying to repro- 
duce it in details which did not directly 
interest him. It was therefore natural that 
his celebration by the extremists should be 
short-lived. Most of them do him what 
justice they can with effort, like Zola, or 
pass him over with some such word as the 
" dry " of Goncourt. His fads were his own. 
None of them have yet become the fads 
of a school, though some principles that 
were restrained with him have become 
battle-cries in later times. His real fads 
are hardly fitted to be banners, for they are 
too specific. In very general theories he 
generally kept rather sane. His real differ- 
ence from the school that claimed him for a 
father half a century after his death, is well 
suggested in the awkward word that Zola is 
fond of throwing at him, " ideologist." The 
idea, the abstract truth and the intellectual 
form of it, its clearness, its statableness, 
its cogency and consistency, is the final 
interest with him. The outer world is only 
the material for the expression of ideas, only 
the illustrations of them, and the ideas are 
therefore not pictorial or dramatic, but 
logical. The arts are ultimately the expres- 
sion of thought and feeling, and color and 

87 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

plastic form are means only. You never 
find him complaining, as his friend Merimee 
did, that the meaning of the plastic arts 
cannot be given in virords, because for a 
slight difference in shade or in curve there 
is no expression in language. All that 
Beyle got out of art he could put into 
words. He made no attempt to compete 
with the painter, like the leading realists 
of the past half-century. Other arts inter- 
ested him only as far as they formed, with- 
out straining, illustrations for expression in 
language of the feelings they appeal to. It 
was with him in music as it was in painting, 
and often his musical criticism is as charm- 
ing to the unattached dilettante as it is 
annoying to the technical critic who judges 
it in its own forms. Beyle names the sen- 
sation with precision always. His vocabu- 
lary has fine shades without weakening 
fluency. In choosing single words to name 
single sensations is his greatest power, and 
it is a power which naturally belongs to a 
man whose eye is inward, a power which the 
word-painters of the environment lack. 
Everything is expression for Beyle, and 
within the limits of the verbally-expressible 
he steadfastly remains. His truth is truth 
to the forms of thought as they exist in the 

88 



STENDHAL 

reason — the clear eighteenth-century reason 
— disembodied truth. 

" It is necessary to have bones and blood in the 
human machine to make it walk. But we give 
slight attention to these necessary conditions of hfe, 
to fly to its great end, its final result — to think and 
to feel. 

" That is the history of drawing, of color, of light 
and shade, of all the various parts of painting, com- 
pared to expression. 

" Expression is the whole of art." 

This reminds one again of Merimee's 
statement, that Beyle could see in the 
Moses nothing but the expression of ferocity ; 
-and an equally conclusive assertion (for it is 
in him no confession) is made by Beyle in 
reference to music, which he says is excel- 
lent if it gives him elevated thoughts on the 
subjects that are occupying him, and if it 
makes him think of the music itself it is 
mediocre. Thus Beyle is as far from being 
an artist as possible. He cares for the forms 
of the outer world, he spends his life in 
looking at beauty and listening to it, but 
only because he knows that that is the way 
to call up in himself the ideas, the sensa- 
tions, the emotions that he loves almost 
with voluptuousness. The basis of genius, 

89 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

he says, in speaking of Michelangelo, is 
logic, and if this is true — as in the sense in 
which he used it, it probably is — Beyle's 
genius was mostly basis. 

Merimee says that though Beyle was con- 
stantly appealing to logic, he reached his 
conclusions not by his reason but by his 
imagination. This is certainly making a 
false distinction. Beyle was not a logician 
in the sense that he got at conclusions 
indirectly by syllogisms. He did not forget 
his premises in the interest of the inductive 
process. What he calls logic is an attitude 
or quality of the mind, and means really 
abstract coherence. Of what he himself calls 
ideology, with as much contempt as Zola 
could put into the word, he says that it is a 
science not only tiresome but impertinent. 
He means any constructive, deductive sys- 
tem of thought. He studied Kant and other 
German metaphysicians, and thought them 
shallow — superior men ingeniously building 
houses of cards. His feet seldom if ever got 
off the solid ground of observations into the 
region of formal, logical deduction. " Facts ! 
facts ! " he cried, and his love of facts at first 
band keeps him from some of the defects of 
the abstract mind. Every statement is inde- 
pendent of the preceding and the succeeding 

90 



STENDHAL 

ones, each is examined by itself, each illus- 
trated by anecdote, inexact enough, to be 
sure, but clear. There is no haze in his 
thought. When Merimee says that it is 
Beyle's imagination and not his logic that 
decides, he is right, in the sense that Beyle 
has no middle terms, that his vision is direct, 
that the a priori process is secondary and 
merely suggestive with him. "What should 
we logically expect to find the case here.'*" 
he will ask before a new set of facts; but 
if his expectation and his observation differ, 
he readjusts his principles. It is no para- 
dox to call a mind both abstract and empiri- 
cal, introspective and scientific; and Beyle's 
was both. 

This quality of logic without construc- 
tiveness shows, of course, in his style. 
There is lucidity of transition, of connec- 
tion, of relation, among the details, but 
the parts are not put together to form an 
artistic whole. They fall on to the paper 
from his mind direct, and the completed 
book has no other unity than has the mind 
of the author. As he was a strong admirer 
of Bacon and his methods, it is safe enough 
•to say that he would have accepted entirely 
this statement about composition as his own 
creed : — 

91 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

" Thirdly, whereas I could have digested these 
rules into a certain method or order, which, I know, 
would have been more admired, as that which would 
have made every particular rule, through its coher- 
ence and relation unto other rules, seem more 
cunning and more deep ; yet I have avoided so to 
do, because this delivering of knowledge in distinct 
and disjoined aphorisms doth leave the wit of man 
more free to turn and toss, and to make use of that 
which is so delivered to more several purposes and 
applications." 

He is the typical suggestive critic, form- 
less, uncreative, general and specific, precise 
and abstract: chaotic to the artist, satisfac- 
tory to the psychologist. It makes no differ- 
ence where the story begins, whether this 
sentence follows that, or where the chapter 
ends. There are no rules of time and place. 
His style is a series of epigrams, and the 
order of their presentation is almost acci- 
dental. "To draw out a plot freezes me," 
he says, and one could guess it from his 
stories, which are in all essentials like his 
essays. To this analytic, unplastic mind 
the plot, the characters, are but illustrations 
of the general truths. The characters he 
draws have separate individual life only so 
far as they are copies. There is no in- 
vention, no construction, no creation. More- 

93 



STENDHAL 

over, there is no style, or no other quality of 
style than lucidity. He not only lacks other 
qualities, he despises them. The "neatly 
turned" style and the rhetorical alike have 
his contempt. Most rhetoricians are "em- 
phatic, eloquent, and declamatory." He 
almost had a duel about Chateaubriand's 
"cime indeterminee des forets. " Rousseau 
is particularly irritating to him. " Only a 
great soul knows how to write simply, and 
that is why Rousseau has put so much rhet- 
oric into the * New Eloi'se, ' which makes it 
unreadable after thirty years." In another 
place he says he detests, in the arrangement 
of words, tragic combinations, which are 
intended to give majesty to the style. He 
sees only absurdity in them. His style fits 
his thought, and his failure to comprehend 
color in style is not surprising in a man 
whose thought has no setting, in a man who 
remarks with scorn that it is easier to de- 
scribe clothing than it is to describe move- 
ments of the soul. He cares only for 
movements of the soul. The sense of form 
might have given his work a larger life, but 
it is part of his rare value for a few that he 
talks in bald statements, single-word sugges- 
tions, disconnected flashes. This intellec- 
tual impressionism, as it were, is more 

93 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

stimulating to them than any work of art. 
These are not poetic souls, it is needless to 
say, however much they may love poetry. 
Beyle is the essence of prose, and it is his 
strength. He loved poetry, but he got from 
it only the prose, so much of the idea as is 
independent of the form. Merimee tells us 
that Beyle murdered verse in reading aloud, 
and in his treatise "De T Amour" Beyle in- 
forms us that verse was invented to help the 
memory, and to retain it in dramatic art is a 
remnant of barbarity. The elevation, the 
abandon^ the passion of poetry — all but the 
psychology — were foreign to this mind, 
whose unimaginative prose is its distinction. 
Perhaps this limitation is kin to another: 
that as novelist Beyle painted with success 
only himself. Much the solidest of his 
characters is Julien Sorel, a copy trait for 
trait of the author, reduced, so to speak, to 
his essential elements. Both Julien and 
Beyle were men of restless ambition, clear, 
colorless minds, and constant activity. 
Julien turned this activity to one thing, 
the study of the art of dominating women, 
and Beyle to three, of which this was the 
principal, and the other two were the com- 
prehension of art principles and the expres- 
sion of them. In his earlier days he had 

94 



STENDHAL 

followed the army of Napoleon, until he 
became disgusted with the grossness of the 
life he saw. What renown he won in the 
army was for making his toilet with com- 
plete care on the eve of battle. From the 
Moscow army he wrote to one of his friends 
that everything was lacking which he 
needed, — "friendship, love (or the sem- 
blance of it), and the arts." For simplicity, 
friendship may be left out in summing up 
Beyle's interests, for while his friendships 
were genuine they did not interest him much, 
except as an opportunity to work up his 
ideas. Of the two interests that remain, the 
one expressed in Julien, the psychology of 
love, illustrated by practice, is much the 
more essential. Julien too had Napoleon 
for an ideal, and when he found he could 
not imitate him in the letter he resigned 
himself to making in his spirit the conquests 
that were open to him. The genius that 
Napoleon put into political relations he 
would put into social ones. All the princi- 
ples of war should live again in his intrigues 
with women. 

This spirit is well enough known in its 
outlines. Perhaps the most perfect sketch 
of it in its unmixed form is in " Les Liai- 
sons Dangereuses," a book which Beyle knew 

95 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

and must have loved. He must have ad- 
mired and envied the Comte de Valmont 
and the Marquise de Merteuil. There is 
here none of the grossness of the Restoration 
comedy in England. It is the art of satisfy- 
ing vanity in a particular way, in its most 
delicate form. It is an occupation and an 
art as imperative, one might almost say as 
impersonal, were not the paradox so violent, 
as any other. What makes Stendhal's 
account of this art differ from that of Dela- 
clos and the other masters is the fact that, 
deeply as he is in it, he is half outside of it : 
he is the psychologist every moment, seeing 
his own attitude as coldly as he sees the 
facts on which he is forming his campaign. 
Read the scene, for instance, where Julien 
first takes the hand of the object of his de- 
signs, absolutely as a matter of duty, a disa- 
greeable move necessary to the success of 
the game. The cold, forced spirit of so 
much of intrigue is clearly seen by Beyle 
and accepted by him as a necessity. He 
used to tell young men that if they were 
alone in a room five minutes with a beautiful 
woman without declaring they loved her, it 
proved them poltroons. Two sides of him, 
however, are always present ; for this is the 
same man who repeats forever in his book 

96 



STENDHAL 

the cry that there is no love in France. He 
means that this science, better than no love 
at all, is inferior to the abandon of the Ital- 
ians. The love of 1770, for which he often 
longs, with its gayety, its tact, its discretion 
" with the thousand qualities of savoir-vivre^^' 
is after all only second. Amour-goitt^ to 
point out the distinction in two famous 
phrases of his own, is forever inferior to 
amour-passion. Stendhal, admiring the lat- 
ter, must have been confined to the former, 
though not in its baldest form, for to some 
of the skill and irony of Valmont he added 
the softness, the sensibility, of a later gen- 
eration, and he added also the will to feel, so 
that his study of feeling and his practice of 
it grew more successful together. Psychol- 
ogy and sensibility are mutual aids in him, 
as they not infrequently are in " observers of 
the human heart," to quote his description 
of his profession. "What consideration can 
take precedence, in a sombre heart, of the 
never-flagging charm of being loved by a 
woman who is happy and gay 1 " The volup- 
tuary almost succeeds in looking as genuine 
as the psychologist. "This nervous fluid, 
so to speak, has each day but a certain 
amount of sensitiveness to expend. If you 
put it into the enjoyment of thirty beautiful 
7 97 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

pictures you shall not use it to mourn the 
death of an adored mistress." You cannot 
disentangle them. Love, voluptuousness, 
art, psychology, sincerity, effort, all are 
mixed up together, whatever the ostensible 
subject. It is a truly French compound, 
perhaps made none the less essentially 
French by the author's constant berating of 
his country for its consciousness and vanity : 
a man who would be uneasy if he were not 
exercising his fascinating powers on some 
woman, and a man whose tears were ready ; 
a man who could not live without action, 
soaking in the dole e far nic7ite ; a man all 
intelligence, and by very force of intelli- 
gence a man of emotion. He would be 
miserable if he gave himself up to either 
side. " In the things of sentiment perhaps 
the most delicate judges are found at Paris 
— but there is always a little chill." He 
goes to Italy; and as he voluptuously feels 
the warm air and sees the warm blood and 
the free movements, the simplicity of heed- 
lessness and passion, his mind goes back 
longingly to the other things. 

" All is decadence here, all in memory. Active 
life is in London and in Paris. Tfie days when I 
am all sympathy I prefer Rome ; but staying here 

98 



STENDHAL 

tends to weaken the mind, to plunge it into stupor. 
There is no effort, no energy, nothing moves fast. 
Upon my word, I prefer the active life of the North 
and the bad taste of our barracks." 

But among these conflicting ideals it is 
possible perhaps to pick the strongest, and I 
think it is painted in this picture: "A 
delicious salon, within ten steps of the sea, 
from which we are separated by a grove of 
orange-trees. The sea breaks gently, Ischia 
is in sight. The ices are excellent." The 
last touch is all Beyle. What is more subtle 
to a man whose whole life is an experiment 
in taste, what more suggestive, what more 
typical, than an ice.^ There is a pervading 
delight in it, in the unsubstantiality, the 
provokingness, the refinement of it. "In 
the boxes, toward the middle of the evening, 
the cavaliere servante of the lady usually 
orders some ices. There is always some 
wager, and the ordinary bets are sherbets, 
which are divine. There are three kinds, 
gelatiy crep^y and pezzidiere. It is an excel- 
lent thing to become familiar with. I have 
not yet determined the best kind, and I 
experiment every evening. " Do not mistake 
th;s for playfulness. The man who cannot 
take an ice seriously cannot take Stendhal 
sympathetically. 

99 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

Such, in the rough, is the point of view 
of this critic of character and of art. Of 
course the value of judgments from such a 
man in such an attitude is dependent entirely 
on what one seeks from criticism. Here is 
what Stendhal hopes to give: — 

" My end is to make each observer question his 
own soul, disentangle his own manner of feeling, 
and thus succeed in forming a judgment for him- 
self, a way of seeing formed in accord with his own 
character, his tastes, his ruling passions, if indeed 
he have passions, for unhappily they are necessary 
to judge the arts." 

The word "passion," here as elsewhere, 
is not to be given too violent a meaning. 
"Emotion" would do as well — sincere 
personal feeling. That there is no end 
of art except to bring out this sincere 
individual feeling is his ultimate belief. 
He is fond of the story of the young girl who 
asked Voltaire to hear her recite, so as to 
judge of her fitness for the stage. Aston- 
ished at her coldness, Voltaire said: "But, 
mademoiselle, if you yourself had a lover 
who abandoned you, what would you do.-*" 
"I would take another," she answered. 
That, Stendhal adds, is the correct point 
of view for nineteen-twentieths of life, but 

lOO 



STENDHAL 

not for art. "I care only for genius, for 
young painters with fire in the soul and 
open intelligence." For disinterested, cool 
taste, for objective justness and precision, 
he has only contempt. Indeed, he accepts 
Goethe's definition of taste as the art of 
properly tying one's cravats in things of the 
mind. Everything that is not special to the 
speaker, personal, he identifies with thinness, 
insincerity, pose. "The best thing one can 
bring before works of art, is a natural mind. 
One must dare to feel what he does feel." 
To be one's self, the first of rules, means to 
follow one's primitive sentiments. "In- 
stead of wishing to judge according to liter- 
ary principles, and defend correct doctrines, 
why do not our youths content themselves 
with the fairest privilege of their age, to 
have sentiments.?" There is no division 
into impersonal judgment and private senti- 
ment. The only criticism that has value is 
private, personal, intimate. 

Less special to Stendhal now, though 
rare at the time in which he lived, is the 
appeal to life as the basis of art. "To find 
the Greeks, look in the forests of America." 
Go to the swimming-school or the ballet to 
realize the correctness and the energy of 
Michelangelo. Familiarity is everything. 

lOI 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

"The work of genius is the sense of conver- 
sation," and as "the man who takes the word 
of another is a cruel bore in a salon," so is 
he as a critic. "What is the antique bas- 
relief to me? Let us try to make good 
modern painting. The Greeks loved the 
nude. We never see it, and moreover it 
repels us." This conclusion shows the 
weakness, or the limitation, of this kind of 
criticism, which as Stendhal applies it 
would keep us from all we have learned 
from the revived study of the nude, because 
the first impression to one unused to seeing 
it is not an artistic one. But the limitations 
of Stendhal and his world are obvious enough. 
It is his eloquence and usefulness within his 
limits that are worth examination. 

"Beauty," to Stendhal, "is simply a 
promise of happiness," and the phrase sums 
up his attitude. Here is his ideal way of 
taking music. He asked a question of a 
young woman about somebody in the audi- 
ence. The young woman usually says noth- 
ing during the evening. To his question 
she answered, " Music pleases when it puts 
your soul in the evening in the same posi- 
tion that love put it in during the day." 

Beyle adds: "Such is the simplicity of 
language and of action. I did not answer, 

I02 



STENDHAL 

and I left her. When one feels music in 
such a way, what friend is not importunate ? " 
When he leaves this field for technical judg- 
ments, he is laughable to any one who does 
not care for the texture of his mind, what- 
ever his expression ; for music to him is 
really only a background for his sensibil- 
ity. " How can I talk of music without 
giving the history of my sensations .'* " This 
is, doubtless, maudlin to the sturdy mascu- 
line mind, this religion of sensibility, this 
fondling of one's sentimental susceptibili- 
ties, and it certainly has no grandeur and 
no morality. 

*' Sensibility," Coleridge says, '' that is, a consti- 
tutional quickness of sympathy with pain and 
pleasure, and a keen sense of the gratifications that 
accompany social intercourse, mutual endearments, 
and reciprocal preferences . . . sensibility is not 
even a sure pledge of a good heart, though among 
the most common meanings of that many-meaning 
and too commonly misapplied expression." 

It leads, he goes on, to effeminate sensi- 
tiveness by making us alive to trifling mis- 
fortunes. This is just, with all its severity, 
and the lover of Stendhal has only to smile, 
apd quote Rousseau, with Beyle himself: 
"I must admit that I am a great booby; for 
I get all my pleasure in being sad." 

103 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

Naturally enough, emmi plays a great 
part in such a nature, thin, intelligent, sen- 
sitive, immoral, self-indulgent. It lies be- 
hind his art of love and his love of art. 
*^ Ennui, this great motive power of intelli- 
gent people," he says; and again: "I was 
much surprised when, studying painting out 
of pure ennni, I found it a balm for cruel 
sorrows." He really loves it. ''Emmi! 
the god whom I implore, the powerful god 
who reigns in the hall of the Fra?igais, the 
only power in the world that can cause the 
Laharpes to be thrown into the fire. " Hence 
his love for Madame du Deffand, the great 
expert in cjimti, and for the whole century 
of ennui, wit, and immorality. Certainly 
the lack of all fire and enthusiasm, the lack 
of faith, of hope, of charity, does go often 
with a clear, sharp, negative freshness of 
judgment, which is often seen in the colder, 
finer, smaller workmen in the psychology 
of social relations. It is a great exposer 
of pretence. It enables Stendhal to see 
that most honest Northerners say in their 
hearts before the statues of Michelangelo, 
" Is that all } " as they say before their ac- 
complished ideal, " Good Lord ! to be happy, 
to be loved, is it only this.? " 

But just as Stendhal keeps in the border- 
104 



STENDHAL 

land between vice and virtue, shrinking 
from grossness, and laughing at morality, 
so he cannot really cross into the deepest 
unhappiness any more than he could into 
passionate happiness. Tragedy repelled him. 
**The fine arts ought never to try to paint 
the inevitable ills of humanity. They only 
increase them, which is a sad success. 
. . . Noble and almost consoled grief is the 
only kind that art should seek to produce." 
To these half-tones his range is limited 
through the whole of his being. Of his 
taste in architecture, of which he was tech- 
nically as ignorant as he was of music, 
Merimee tells us that he disliked Gothic, 
thinking it ugly and sad, and liked the 
architecture of the Renaissance for its ele- 
gance and coquetry; that it was always 
graceful details, moreover, and not the gen- 
eral plan that attracted him; which is a 
limitation that naturally goes with the other. 
Of course the charm and the short-comings 
that are everywhere in Beyle's art criticism 
are the same in his judgments of national 
traits, which form a large part of his work. 
Antipathy to the French is one of his fixed 
ideas, thorough Frenchman that he was; 
for his own vanity and distrust did not 
make him hate the less genuinely those 

105 



LIIM^.RARY STATESMEN 

weaknesses. Vanity is bourgeois, he thinks, 
and there is for him no more terrible word. 
It spoils the best things, too — conversation 
amoni;- others; for the French conversation 
is work. 

"The most tiresome defect in our present 
civilization is the desire to produce effect." 
So with their bravery, their love, all is cal- 
culated, there is no abandonment. This 
annoys him particularly in the women, who 
are always the most important element to 
him. He gives them their due, but coldly: 
"France, however, is always the country 
where there are always the most passable 
women. They seduce by delicate pleasures 
made possible by their mode of dress, and 
these pleasures can be appreciated by the 
most passionless natures. Dry natures are 
afraid of Italian beauty." Of course this 
continual flinging at the French is only 
partly vanity, self-glorification in being 
able, almost alone of foreigners, to appre- 
ciate the Italians. It is partly contempt for 
his leading power, for mere intelligence. 
In his youth he spoke with half-regret of 
his being so reasonable that he would go to 
bed to save his health even when his head 
was crowded with ideas that he wanted to 
write. It was his desperate desire to be as 

1 06 



STENDHAL 

Italian as he could, rather than any serene 
belief that he had thrown off much of his 
French nature, that made him leave orders 
to have inscribed on his tombstone: — 

Qui Giace 

Arrigo ]3cylc Milanese 

Visse, scrissc, am6. 

It comes dangerously near to a pose, perhaps, 
and yet there is genuineness enough in it to 
make it pathetic. He praises the Italians 
because they do not judge their happiness. 
He never ceased to judge his. Nowhere 
outside of Italy, he thinks, can one hear 
with a certain accent, "O Dio! com' c 
bello ! " But the implication is quite unfair. 
I have heard a common Frenchwoman ex- 
claim, under her breath, before an ugly 
peacock, "Dieu! comme c'est beau," with 
an intensity that was not less because it 
was restrained. But restraint was Beyle's 
bugbear. From his own economical, calcu- 
lating nature he flew almost with worship to 
its opposite. He is speaking of Julien and 
therefore of himself, when he says, in " Le 
Rouge et le Noir:" "Intellectual love has 
doubtless more cleverness than true love, but 
it has only moments of enthusiasm. It 
knows itself too well. It judges itself 

107 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

unceasingly. Far from driving away thought, 
it exists only by force of thought." He calls 
Julien mediocre, and he says of him, "This 
dry soul felt all of passion that is possible 
in a person raised in the midst of this ex- 
cessive civilization which Paris admires." 
Beyle saves Julien from contempt at the end 
(and doubtless he consoled himself with 
something similar) by causing him, while 
remaining a conscious hypocrite, to lose his 
life unhesitatingly, absurdly, perversely, for 
the sake of love. Once he has shown him- 
self capable of the divine unreason, of exal- 
tation, he is respectable. Where the enthu- 
siasm is he is blinded; he cannot see the 
crudity and stupidity of passion. Before 
this mad enthusiasm the French fineness 
and proportion is insignificant. He loses 
his memory of the charm he has told so 
well. " Elsewhere there is no conception 
of this art of giving birth to the laugh of the 
mind, and of giving delicious joys by unex- 
pected words." 

As might be expected, Beyle is even more 
unfair to the Germans than he is to his 
countrymen ; for the sentiment of which he 
is the epicure and the apologist, has nothing 
in common with the reverent and poetic 
sentiment in which the Germans are so rich. 

io8 



STENDHAL 

This last Beyle hates as he hates Rousseau 
and Madame de Stael. It is phrase, moon- 
shine, and the fact that it is bound up in a 
stable and orderly character but makes it 
the more irritating. They are sentimental, 
innocent, and unintelligent, he says, and he 
quotes with a sneer, as true of the race, '' A 
soul honest, sweet, and peaceful, free of 
pride and remorse, full of benevolence and 
humanity, above the nerves and the pas- 
sions." In short, quite anti-Beylian, quite 
submissive, sweet, and moral. For England 
he has much more respect, and even a slight 
affection. He likes their anti-classicism, 
and he likes especially the beauty of their 
women, which he thinks second only to that 
of the Italians. The rich complexions, the 
free, open countenances, the strong forms 
rouse him sometimes almost to enthusiasm ; 
but of course it is all secondary in the inevi- 
table comparison. "English beauty seems 
paltry, without soul, without life, before 
the divine eyes which heaven has given to 
Italy." The somewhat in the submissive 
faces of the Englishwomen that threatens 
future eimui^ Stendhal thinks has been 
ingrained there by the workings of the ter- 
rible law of propriety which rules as a despot 
over the unfortunate island. It is the vision 

109 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

of caprice in the face of the Italian woman 
that makes him certain of never being bored. 
It is not surprising that women should be 
the objects through which Beyle sees every- 
thing. A man who sees in relativity, arbi- 
trariness, caprice, the final law of nature, 
and who feels a sympathy with this law, not 
unnaturally finds in the absolute, personal, 
perverse nature of women his most congenial 
companionship. He finds in women some- 
thing more elemental than reasonableness. 
He finds the basal instincts. They best 
illustrate his psychology of final,' absolute 
choice. Of course there is the other side 
too, the epicure's point of view, from which 
their charm is the centre of the paradise of 
leisure, music, and ices. His hyperbole in 
praising art is "equal to the first hand- 
shake of the woman one loves." In politics 
he sees largely the relations of sex; and in 
national character it is almost always of the 
women he is talking. Their influence marks 
the advance of civilization. "Tenderness 
has made progress among us because society 
has become more perfect," and tenderness 
here is this soft or, if you choose, effeminate, 
sensibility. 

"The admission of women to perfect equality 
would be the surest sign of civilization. It would 

no 



STENDHAL 

double the intellectual forces of the human race 
and its probabilities of happiness. ... To attain 
equality, the source of happiness for both sexes, the 
duel would have to be open to women ; the pistol 
demands only address. Any woman, by subjecting 
herself to imprisonment for two years, would be able, 
at the expiration of the term, to get a divorce. 
Towards the year Two Thousand these ideas will 
be no longer ridiculous.'^ 

In this passage is the whole man, intelli- 
gent and fantastic, sincere and suspicious, 
fresh, convincing, absurd. He is rapidly 
settling back into obscurity, to which he is 
condemned as much by the substance of his 
thought as by the formlessness of its expres- 
sion. Entirely a rebel, and only slightly 
a revolutionist, he is treated by the world 
as he treated it. A lover of many interest- 
ing things inextricably wound up together, 
his earnest talk about them will perhaps for 
some time longer be an important influence 
on the lives of a few whose minds shall be 
of the kind to which a sharp, industrious, 
capricious, and rebellious individual is the 
best stimulant to their own thought. 

1894. 



Ill 



^ A 



MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 



MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 

Prosper Merimee, perhaps the most skilful 
of French short story-tellers, has talked of 
his art preferences in essays little inferior 
in execution to his tales, and revealed in 
them the most attractive side of his own 
nature, and yet most of them lie hidden in 
the files of " Le Constitutionel," " Le 
Temps," "Les Debats," and "La Revue des 
Deux Mondes." Indeed, the powers which 
charm the lover of deftness in literature 
sometimes appear even more distinctly when 
he is speaking his critical opinion than they 
do when he is telling a story. For this reason 
the essays are almost unique in form. It 
would be hard to find another example of an 
art of this kind, — the kind that has gone 
into the best short fiction, the art in which 
the execution is the most prominent merit, 
the perfectly chiselled miniature, shown in 
miscellaneous critical essays. Why, then, 
does no one study his criticism } 

IIS 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

We know his irony in his stories. When, 
after the death of Carmen, the reader comes 
suddenly to a comment on certain gypsy 
words, he feels it. He feels it at the death 
of Arsene, surrounded by the doctor, her 
lover, and the great lady who with her piety 
has deprived the dying peasant of her lover, 
and is herself in danger of falling, with all 
her virtue, a prey to the same man. He 
feels it as, after this scene, he reads this last 
chapter; with the epitaph written by the 
woman of prayer over the grave of the girl 
who had known only one love, and had had 
that taken from her as immoral by the vir- 
tuous woman who appropriated it. 

" Well, madam, you tell me that my story is fin- 
ished and that you do not care to hear more. I 
should think you would be curious to know whether 
or not M. de Salligny made his trip to Greece ; 
whether — but it is late, and you have had enough. 
So be it. At least avoid hasty judgments, for I 
protest that I have said nothing to authorize them. 
Especially, do not doubt the truth of ray story. 
Are you sceptical ? Go to Pere Lachaise ; twenty 
feet to the left of the tomb of General Foy, you 
will find a very simple lias stone, surrounded by 
flowers that are always well tended. On the stone 
you can read the name of my heroine cut in large 
letters : ARSENE GUILLOT. And if you bend 

ii6 



MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 

over this tomb you will see, if the rain has not 
already erased it, a line written with a lead-pencil, 
in a very fine hand : 

" ' Poor Arsene ! She is praying for us.' " 

The charm of the irony is, like the charm 
of the execution, in distance, in delicacy of 
suggestion. In his essays, this preference 
for less obvious methods of suggestion, the 
dislike of the easy and the explicit, is stated. 
"He found ]\qy piqiiante, to use one of those 
expressions that I hate." And in his essay 
on Nicholas Gogol he wrote a passage that 
is at once a good illustration of his essay 
style, and an open expression of his im- 
patience with commonplace methods in 
literature: — 

*' I think the study well done and graphically 
depicted, as M. Diaforus would say, but I don't 
like the kind ; madness is one of the misfortunes 
which move us, but also disgust. Doubtless by 
putting a madman into his story a writer is sure ot 
making an effect. He moves a cord always sensi- 
tive, but the means is vulgar, and the talent of M. 
Gogol is not one of those that need to descend to 
these trivialities. Let us leave madmen to begin- 
ners, with the dogs, those characters of an equally 
irresistible effect. What a glory to wring tears from 
your reader if you break a poodle's leg ! Homer, 
in my opinion, is excusable for making us weep 

117 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

at the mutual recognition of the dog Argus and 
Ulysses only because he was, I believe, the first to 
discover the resources offered by the canine race to 
an author at the end of expedients." 

Thus the essays have the same severity 
that distinguishes the art of his stories. 
More important, however, to the student of 
Merimee is the fact that they give another 
side of him, — a side that a careful reader 
might guess from the stories, a side that is 
more openly suggested in his letters, but 
which even in the letters shows itself only 
timidly and indirectly. It is a rather sin- 
gular fact that straightforward seriousness 
should show itself clearly in the essays 
alone. In them he tells without sarcasm 
the principles of art in which he believes. 
He describes the art that charms him and 
moves him. He talks of friendship, too, 
in a tone that he would shrink from using 
in a letter. It seems as if he knew the pub- 
lic expected this, and would not laugh at him 
for it as a friend might. The Merimee of 
the letters and stories is an artist of bril- 
liancy, force, and elegance, but a man who 
is always on the defensive, protecting him- 
self from ridicule by distance. Timidity or 
taste makes him avoid always a serious 
tone. The Merimee of the essays is the 

ii8 



MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 

skilful artist still, and he is besides a man 
of broad comprehension and sympathy. It 
would be hard to find in his letters or stories 
as simple a tone as the one in these words 
about a story of Gogol's : 

" I hasten to come to a little masterpiece, ' An 
Oldtime Household.' In a few pages M. Gogol 
tells us the lives of two good old people, husband 
and wife, living in the country, persons in whose 
heads there is no grain of malice, deceived and 
adored by their peasants, ingeniously egotistic be- 
cause they believe all the world happy, as they are 
themselves. The wife dies. The husband, who 
had seemed to live only to eat, fails and dies a few 
months after his wife. We laugh and cry in reading 
this charming tale, where the art of the story-teller 
is hidden in the simplicity of the story. All is true, 
natural. There is no detail which is not charming 
and a part of the general effect." 

In personal affection it is the same. He 
shrank from speaking seriously of affection, 
orally or in letters, and yet there is in his 
essay on Victor Jacquemont sincere feeling, 
entirely undisguised and unclothed in irony. 
He dwells with fondness over some of the 
various traits of the character, and when he 
comes to speak of his voice, he uses a quo- 
tation singularly warm for him: "When I 

119 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

heard him speak I used to think of these 
lines of Shakespeare: — 

" * Oh ! it came on my ears like the sweet South 
That breathes upon a bank of violets.' " 

An essay that shows strong literary affec- 
tion is one on Madame du Deffand in " Le 
Moniteur" for April 29, 1867. Nobody has 
entered with more accurate sympathy into 
the character of the famous wit. Merimee 
speaks simply a real love of the woman and 
of the period. He does not garble the facts, 
but he is lenient because he feels the elo- 
quence of Madame du Deffand from her own 
point of view; he feels her loyalty to her 
first impressions, her frankness, her desire 
to please, the simplicity and elevation of 
her intellectual tastes. He felt, too, the 
genuineness of her ephemeral affections, 
and he knew the sincerity in the seeming 
frivolity. It is a passing book review, and 
yet it shows better than anything else he 
has written his appreciation of one kind of 
mind. 

Simple liking for certain things and cer- 
tain people is not the only trait of character 
which is seen clearly oaly in the essays. 
Another trait, allied to it, is intellectual 
charity. In his letters, Merimee' s criti- 

120 



MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 

cisms of things he does not like are sharp 
and contemptuous. That he could speak 
with more reserve in his role of a profes- 
sional critic is shown in an essay on the 
English pre-Raphaelite art in " La Revue 
des Deux Mondes" for October 15, 1857. 
Nothing could be further from his sympathy; 
nothing could be in sharper contrast with 
his skill in economy and convergence of parts 
than their pointless details; nothing more 
different from his restraint and fineness than 
their efforts for literary symbolism. Of 
course he saw their weaknesses, but he also 
saw their merits. The weaknesses are 
described, for him, with little bitterness or 
sarcasm. Here is a description of a picture 
by Hunt : — 

"A young woman is singing before an open 
piano. She holds in her hand a sheet of music. 
Behind her is a young man in morning dress, with 
his arm passed gayly about her waist. Her mouth 
is open ; probably she is running a division ; but 
she has a frightful grimace, and, moreover, as I 
learned by putting on my spectacles, she has tears 
in her eyes. Beside this group, in an easy-chair, is 
a cat which shares the taste of Harlequin, of whom 
it is well known that he liked only those serenades 
at' which there is food. This cat has procured for 
itself a canary, and is in the process of killing it. 

121 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

... I wished to know why this fair singer wept, 
while her companion was so gay. Unfortunately 
the title was very laconic, ' Conscience Awakened.' 
I admit that I was more puzzled than I had been 
before I had resorted to the catalogue. Fortunately 
I met an English artist, who gave me the following 
explanation : ' You certainly see that the two per- 
sons in this picture are not demeaning themselves 
properly. Look at the hand of the young woman. 
. . You will notice that she has no marriage ring, 
and is therefore unmarried. The arm passed about 
her waist shows that she has a lover. She is singing 
one of Moore's melodies, which you ought to know 
by heart, and of which you can easily read the title 
by standing on your head. This title will remind 
you that in the third couplet the unfortunate woman 
meets an allusion to her own false position, and this 
allusion chokes her in the midst of the roulade. It 
is then that her conscience is awakened, and there 
you have what Mr. Hunt has expressed.' ^ And the 
cat ? ' I asked. ' The cat is at once an interesting 
detail and a moral. It represents the bad instincts, 
and the canary represents innocence, two well-chosen 
emblems.' " 

Yet even in a school so ridiculous to him 
Merimee finds good, and points out the 
various technical merits with fairness. Even 
in Mr. Ruskin he sees a use. He says Mr. 
Ruskin has a few ideas that are sane, even 
practicable, and that these ideas have been 

122 



MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 

made more effective in England by the vio- 
lence of their expression. His general 
impression of the pre-Raphaelites is thus 
put: "Habits of reflection, a taste for 
subtlety, pretension to depth, mixed with a 
great deal of inexperience," and, he adds 
later, an entire lack of comprehension of 
the noble style. 

His technique in the essays is worth as 
much study by young critics as young novel- 
ists put on his stories. It is almost impos- 
sible to see the logic of the arrangement, 
and quite impossible not to feel that there 
is logic. Though there is no apparent 
synthesis, the man of whom he writes stands 
out; the picture is finished, given in a few 
strokes. He is abrupt, but not incomplete. 
His bold unity is beyond analysis. There 
are few introductions, no conclusions, and 
no obvious ornament. His dislike of the 
opposite method of express transition and 
setting he has suggested in "Charles IX." 
in an imaginary dialogue between the reader 
and the author : — 

" Ah, Mr. Author, what a fine chance you have 
here to draw portraits ! And such portraits ! You 
will take us to the castle at Madrid, in the midst of 
the court — and such a court ! Are you going to 
show it to us, this French-Italian court? Introduce 

123 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

us in turn to all the distinguished characters. How 
much we shall learn, and how interesting will be the 
day spent among such grand persons ! 

"Alas, Mr. Reader, what a request you are 
making ! I would fain have the talent to write a 
history of France ; I should not then be telling 
stories. But tell me, why do you wish me to intro- 
duce to you persons who play no part in my 
novel ? 

" You do a great wrong in not giving them, parts 
in it. What, you take me back to the year 1572, 
and then pretend to escape the portrayal of so 
many remarkable men ! Come, you cannot hesi- 
tate. Begin, and I shall give you the first 
phrase : The door of the salon opened^ and there 
appeared . . . 

" But, Mr. Reader, there were no salons in the 
castle of Madrid. Salons . . . 

"Well. The great hall was filled with a crowds 
. . . etc. . . . among whom might be distinguished 
. . . etc. 

" What do you wish to have distinguished ? 

" Of course, in the first place, Charles IX ! . . . 

" And in the second ? 

" Not so fast. First you must describe his cos- 
tume, then you will give a portrait of his appearance, 
and finally of his character. That is to-day the high 
road for all noveUsts. 

"His costume? He was in hunting dress, with 
a great huntsman's horn about his neck. 

" You are short ..." 
124 



MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 

Merimee then yields and gives a sketch 
in his own manner: — 

" Well, imagine a young man rather well formed, 
with his head a little sunk into his shoulders, his 
neck stretched out, and his face thrown awkwardly 
forward. His nose is rather large, the lips are fine 
and long, the upper one protruding. His com- 
plexion is wan, and his large green eyes never look 
at the person to whom he is talking. Moreover, it 
is impossible to read in his eyes Sai7it Bartholomew^ 
or anything like it. No, his expression is rather 
stupid and restless than hard or savage." 

In the historical essays Merimee's art 
does not work as well as in the literary 
essays. 

" I like in history only anecdotes, and among the 
anecdotes I prefer those in which I think I see a 
true picture of the customs and characteristics of 
the epoch. This is not a noble taste, but I admit 
to my shame that I would freely give up Thucydides 
for some authentic memoirs of Aspasia or of one 
of the slaves of Pericles ; for memoirs, which are 
familiar talks of the author with the reader, alone 
furnish those portraits of man which amuse and 
interest me.'' 

As • an example, he quotes this " concise 
note" from "L'Etoile": — 

\2^ 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

"The young lady of Chateauneuf, one of the 
favorites of the king before he went to Poland, 
having made a love marriage with Antinotti, a 
Florentine, an overseer of galley slaves at Mar- 
seilles, and having found him wantoning, killed him 
like a man with her own hands. . . . Out of this 
story and the many others of which Brantome is 
full my imagination builds a character, and I call to 
life a woman of the court of Henry the Third." 

This taste makes Merimee a success as a 
writer of historical essays only where the 
subject is fitted to concise narrative, where 
the bearing is apparent without explanation. 
In some essays, " Les Cosaques d' Autrefois 
and les Faux Demetrius," for instance, he is 
hard to read, for the stories are long and not 
interesting in outline, and the dulness of 
them is only emphasized by Merimee' s bare- 
ness of statement. One feels as Merimee 
himself felt of Sallust : — 

*' In a long work his style might weary, on 
account of a conciseness which is perhaps not 
sufficiently free from mannerism. AppHed to short 
tales it produces the deepest impression, by com- 
bining energy of thought with sobriety of setting. 
Art sometimes shows itself in this style a little too 
openly, in spite of the affectation of disorder in the 
composition, and one frequently forgets the interest 
of the story to admire the skill of the story-teller." 

126 



MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 

The opinions expressed in the essays make 
us like Merimee far more than do the trucu- 
lent condemnations of the letters. Some- 
times, of course, he is unsympathetic, but 
seldom or never caustic. 

" Michelangelo," he says, ** has conceived his Moses 
as an athlete. I will be bold enough to say that 
this savage giant, with arms like a porter's and a 
beard of ropes, does not to me represent the guide 
and prophet of the Hebrews. He is a man whom 
no one would care to meet in the woods, but who 
would not know how to force obedience from a stiff- 
necked race." 

He does not like what he thinks the exag- 
gerated grandeur that Plutarch and Shake- 
speare give to Caesar, but he likes still less 
the method of Suetonius. 

'^ Very different from Plutarch, who gives all his 
heroes the grand air, Suetonius seems to have de- 
lighted in belitding his. His is a low and spiteful 
mind that cannot understand genius. He has neither 
indignation for vice nor enthusiasm for virtue, but 
he seeks everywhere ridicule, because ridicule levels 
all reputations and destroys both terror and admira- 
tion. Suetonius shows his whole nature in his 
life of Caesar. He gives but a few pages to his 
many remarkable deeds, but he finds space to 

127 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

repeat in full the devilish songs of the soldiers 
who accompanied in his triumph the conqueror 
of the world." 

This last quotation has the tone that can 
seldom be found in any of M^rim^e's work 
but his essays. Apparently he enjoyed 
them less than his stories and his letters, 
so it may be that the tone of seriousness, 
here even severe, is one that represents 
him less intimately than his pervading irony. 
Yet his character is the broader, that he 
could speak in that tone so well. And it 
is not at all certain, merely because he was 
usually half contemptuous in his art and in 
his personal relations, that he did not have 
as genuinely the gentler and simpler emo- 
tions and preferences that can be seen in his 
criticism. It is not unlikely that his own 
words about Beyle apply to himself : — 

"... the fear of being through a dupe, and the 
constant care to avoid this misfortune ; hence this 
factitious hardening, this despairing analysis of low 
motives in all generous action, this resistance to the 
first impulses of the heart, much more affected than 
real with him, it seems to me." 

Certainly this timid narrowing is, what- 
ever the cause, much less constant in his 

128 



MERIMEE AS A CRITIC 

essays. Therefore, to read Merimee's criti- 
cism after knowing his letters and stories, 
is to see an expression of the more generous 
side of him. It is to be able, in judging 
him, to see him less limited to irony, to see 
him as a man of wider range. 

1895. 



129 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 



VI 

AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 



In contrast to the common assertion that the 
American race is developing in its feelings for 
life and expression some traits prominent in 
the French is the fact that in our contem- 
porary literature we are almost weakest where 
the French are strongest. We who in the arts 
which are less generally followed here, in paint- 
ing and sculpture, have contributed to the 
first rank of artists, and are respectable at 
least in fiction, are in an art which is much 
more practised here, that of criticism, really 
insignificant. Although in no country do 
people read more, in no country of impor- 
tance is the current comment on books more 
lacking in thought and workmanship. In 
short stories we are doing something firm 
and individual, but in the art of which in a 
nation of readers we might expect high de- 
velopment, we are to-day as far behind France 
and even England as we are in poetry. In 

133 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

comment on the drama, the same low level is 
unbroken. Although we are a theatre-going 
nation we have nobody with the knowledge 
of the stage which makes experts of Sarcey, 
Archer, and Lemaitre ; nobody with the 
literary charm put into dramatic criticism 
of Walkley or Anatole France. Strangely 
enough, the most interesting criticism of the 
day is put upon those arts of which our peo- 
ple know least. Are there many present 
commentators on books in the United States 
who have the subtlety, the fine edge, the 
intellectual fineness shown in Mr. Brownell's 
criticism of art? Is there to be found in 
much of our literary criticism the grave cer- 
tainty and elevation of Mr. La Farge, or the 
results of study, contact, energy, and high 
aim which meet in the style of Mrs. Van 
Rensselaer and make it alive even when it is 
rough? These critics in their speech sound 
important, they have the undertone of feeling 
and understanding, they stand for grasp and 
choice. How often can they be matched 
among the living American writers whose 
volumes deal with books? To add one other 
to the list, who of our literary critics gives 
the clear, informal explanations of technical 
faults and successes that are thrown off in 
anonymous judgments of contemporary pic- 

134 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

tures and books on painting by the strict 
and lawyerlike pen of Mr. Cox? 

The explanation of these seemingly anoma- 
lous conditions is to be found in what at first 
sight appears to constitute the anomalies. It 
is the size of our reading public that keeps 
our literary criticism lower than our creative 
work in literature and the plastic arts and lower 
than our art criticism. We read not only 
more books than the people of other coun- 
tries, but more newspapers also ; and it is the 
newspaper which partly sets and entirely rep- 
resents average American standards. The 
large amount of space given in the dailies to 
literature and drama forms a contrast to the 
quality of the treatment. They must give 
the crowd what it will take immediately. 
They, the newspapers, aiming at great circu- 
lations; the plays, aiming at popular runs; 
the books, aiming at immediate sale, are all 
largely formed by the taste of that part of 
humanity which in other countries, where 
there is no popular education, has little to do 
with Hterature. Small and few indeed among 
us are the sets yet formed which raise and 
nourish men who care more for the mild ap- 
proval of the judicious than for the money 
and the notoriety of popular success. Sup- 
pose that an American understood the mech- 

135 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

anism of the drama as well as M. Sarcey, 
say, or Mr. Archer, would he be found out and 
encouraged by our journals? For a critic as 
erudite as M. Brunetiere what respect, what 
dignity is there here compared to what France 
offers to solid work? What newspaper in 
America would not call an unknown Walkley 
or Anatole France "too literary"? How 
many editors frankly tell contributors that 
literary excellence is nothing; that popu- 
larity of subject is everything! Thus it is 
that the size of the audience which listens to 
the critic here makes him speak like a stump- 
orator. The very possibilities of criticism keep 
from it healthy encouragement. The crowd 
will not be led too fast. We support Hterary 
criticism in but one weekly of the same class 
with the French and English, and in but one 
daily. Expert handling of what we all feel 
capable of handling bores us, and even in- 
sults us. There is a story, probably true, 
that the owner of a great New York paper 
discharged his dramatic editor and openly 
announced his preference for ordinary re- 
porters as critics of the theatre; and book- 
reviews in that as in most of our publications 
are the side issues of untrained men. The 
principal exception consists of the careless 
opinions of men who are famous for other 

136 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

things, and these opinions, being bought for 
the signature, are almost always miserable. 
How many readers know of the existence of 
Mr. Brownell compared to the number who 
read the trivialities published by prominent 
novelists whose critical faculties are so feeble 
that they are rightly treated with condescen- 
sion by even the newspapers? When one 
of these prominent men does write criticisms 
he is careful not to go over the heads of his 
readers or to hurt the man who says, as 
so many say, " Perhaps I don't know what is 
good, but I know what I like," meaning that 
his opinion is as good as another's. The 
action of the committee of the Army of the 
Tennessee, overruling as unintelligent the 
decision of the Sculptors' Society, to which 
they had submitted designs for a statue of 
Sherman, is fresh in our minds. We will 
accept facts from experts, but our opinions 
are our own. 

It is his own opinion, therefore, that the aver- 
age reader has reflected back to him by the 
newspapers and magazines. One characteris- 
tic of his opinion is that it is not artistic but 
ethical. For instance, we do not find exposi- 
tions of the methods of Ibsen, Pinero, or 
D-umas, to take three men remarkable for 
technical qualities, but homilies on the char- 

^Z1 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

acter of Mrs. Tanqueray or on the fitness of 
showing *' certain things " to the public. In- 
stead of enthusiasm Hke that of the elder 
Dumas over his son's skill in getting his 
heroine back to Paris after the third act of 
La Dame aux Camelias, we have soliloquies 
on the possibility of Marguerite's being so 
refined in her occupation. Of the few daihes 
most read by cultivated Americans, two have 
for dramatic critics men whose moral tone is 
so high that they are actually unacquainted 
with the unwholesome plays of France ; and 
I have seen a musical critic of prominence 
leave the opera-house after the first act at the 
first presentation of ** Manon," because it 
followed the novel too closely, to write the 
next day a scathing dismissal of the opera. 
Nowhere do we get the detachment, penetra- 
tion, and learning that must combine to make 
an equipped critic of books or plays. The 
only one among those New York papers 
worthy of notice which is free from Jeromiac 
concern lacks artistic seriousness, too, and 
aims only at jocosity. Our critics do not 
study foreign models, they do not study their 
subjects, and they do not have the general 
attitude of culture which is more needed by 
the critic than by any other artist. Without 
these difficult acquirements they can, with 

138 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

instincts compounded of ethical obsessions 
and carelessness of art, mirror a few prejudices^ 
and that is all they need to do. 

To remain cheerful, however, one need 
only remember that criticism as an art is 
always a late development, which truth is 
too general to grieve over. Winslow Homer 
can be a powerful artist on the solitary coast 
of Maine, Miss Wilkins can make pictures 
in forlorn New England towns, but a gen- 
eral excellence in criticism, much more than 
in any other art, is dependent on the for- 
mation of groups of intelligent people, which 
is dependent on social stratification. Criti- 
cism, which is immediately the voice of 
culture, will appear only when part of the 
general intelligence now unsifted in our raw 
mass of democracy is freed and crystallized 
in smaller classes independent of everything 
save their own tastes. It is, indeed, not 
impossible that when these necessary divi- 
sions are made, the culture which will result 
will be broader on account of the influence 
of democracy, which must still be felt; 
because that influence, destructive now, may 
then tend to give a deeper human tone, to 
give to the ordinary critic, the mere spokes- 
man of his environment, something of that 
wide interest tempered with humor, that 

139 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

free play with his material, the average 
mind, which has usually been the exclusive 
possession of the great critic of life, the 
Rabelais, Cervantes, or Moliere. Much as 
we need instruction and technical under- 
standing, requisites to any advance, we shall 
of course be lucky if our culture, when it 
comes, is slower to run the ordinary his- 
torical course into formulism, and one may 
at least hope that the narrowness of the 
barrier which will separate our future culti- 
vated class from the masses behind it, will 
keep it on the move and prevent hardening 
into forms. Just now, however, it is natural 
to think less of possible safeguards for our 
prospective civilization than of the changes 
needed to begin the refining process. There- 
fore, any growth of social distinctions, of a 
leisure class, of respect for tradition and 
authority, is an encouraging sign, the danger 
of the sequence of bookishness, rigidity, and 
deviation from the constants of human 
nature being too remote to think of yet. In 
the mean time there is more immediate 
promise in the criticism of art than there is 
in that of literature, probably because the 
public, recognizing the technical difificulties 
of painting and sculpture, sees more often 
the need of training for the critic of pictures 

140 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

and statues than it sees the need of train- 
ing and natural fitness in a man who does 
merely what almost any reading American 
feels capable of doing. 



II 

Kenyon Cox once wrote : — 

" Nothing could show more curiously than does 
this book the advantages and disadvantages of artis- 
tic criticism of art ; nothing could exhibit more 
completely the qualities and defects of the artist 
turned critic. The introduction opens with the 
statement that * only the writing on art by one who 
has technical knowledge of it is of practical value,' 
and, scattered through the pages, there are many 
contemptuous flings at ' a certain class of writers on 
art ' whose * ignorance of the technique of any art is 
only equalled by their ability to write on it.' No 
doubt the sneer is often justified, yet of many of the 
artists who make it, it would hardly be too much to 
say that ' their knowledge of their subject is only 
equalled by their inability to write clearly of it.' " 

The combination of a knowledge of their 
subject with talent for expression exists in 
two of the many painters who write, and the 
qualities which they have shown tell what 
is best in criticism in the United States 

141 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

and what is needed by most of their fellow 
critics. John La Farge stands at the head 
of those painters who are American both by 
birth and residence, and his " Considerations 
on Painting " and " Letters from Japan " 
give the most typical artist criticism in the 
country, that is, criticism most typical of 
the devoted artist, for he has never sacrificed 
an hour to perfunctory writing or painting. 

Looking down the list of painters who 
have left their thoughts in prose, from 
Fromentin and Delacroix and Millet at the 
top, through Vasari and Reynolds and Cou- 
ture and Hunt, to Breton and Whistler, 
nearer the bottom, one finds always a keen 
interest in general principles, very differ- 
ently expressed, to be sure, poetically by 
Millet, ridiculously by Whistler, sentimen- 
tally by Breton, clumsily by Couture, but 
in one way or another always emphasized, 
except in the very rare cases, where the 
author cared for execution only. The 
average artist is interested in life and 
likes to generalize about it, so that the talk 
of the studio, apart from the class room, is 
general, human, and untechnical. " Sin- 
cerity " will be heard many times where 
"values" is spoken once. Mr. La Farge is 
typical also of the modern painter, in being 

142 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

a man of experience outside of art. He has 
done many things, — studied law, travelled, 
gone into society, read largely in philosophy, 
science, and literature, painted, and been an 
inventor in stained glass. Although some 
of his psychological explanations border on 
pedantry, most of his culture is digested, 
and the experience of the man of the world 
makes stronger what the artist says. 

His most general virtue is appreciation. 
He is never bored or even sleepy. There is 
always a mass of meaning in the world for 
him, an interest rather in the subject-matter 
of art than in its processes, for he has escaped 
entirely the fads of his day, and knows how 
much like other men the strongly original 
man must be. As Couture says of painting: 
"Still later, in Poussin, it reaches maturity; 
it has become grave and reserved; it re- 
turns to the past, gathers everything to- 
gether, and gives a beautiful lesson." Sim- 
ilar praise is deserved by the writings of 
Mr. La Farge. Respect for the permanent 
good, gravity, reserve, the love of a beauti- 
ful lesson, are in him, and he follows his 
own advice : — 

" First, therefore, see that your methods are 
respectful. Never make light of difficulties or slip 
easily over what you find to be obstacles. Better be 

143 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

gawky than flippant in your work. Imitate in your 
methods the methods of religious hfe, even if they 
obhge you to the lengthiest preparations. And if a 
passionate impulse carries you away, your expression 
will still have the accent that comes of previous 
respectful meditation." 

His appreciation, sure and full as it is, 
and attractive as it makes what he says of 
other men, sometimes destroys the unity of 
his own entirely uncreative criticism, as 
where the great figure which passes through 
one of his books, present always, although 
sometimes in the background, overshadows 
the author himself. It was like Mr. La 
Farge, however, to pick out for a guide the 
most admirable of art critics, the sanest, the 
most penetrating, the one who by his depth 
and certainty of thought and splendor of 
expression can stir up the emotions while 
appealing directly to the reason. La Farge 
is above artistic trivialities of every kind, 
caring only for the good, wise in his judg- 
ment, showing his standards as inevitably by 
what he quotes as by what he says. Just 
as Fromentin stands out as his instructor in 
criticism, the great personalities are his 
landmarks in painting, men like Ruysdael, 
of whom he says that " his grave and solemn 
mind gives to the simplest and most common 

144 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

place of landscapes a look of sad importance," 
men like Rembrandt, Millet, and Michel- 
angelo. He resembles his master from afar, 
like him filled with enthusiasm for large 
personalities and the noble style in art, dis- 
dainful of triviality and all digression, of 
tricks of execution, of any technical accom- 
plishment that is not part of its subject, full 
of restrained poetry. So elevated are these 
virtues in themselves that one can read the 
lesser writer after the greater, and think 
rather of the distinction which imagination 
gives even to modest literary powers than 
of the differences which make " Maitres 
d ' Autrefois " great and "Considerations on 
Painting" only admirable. 

Like Ruysdael's, La Farge's mind, al- 
though not sad, is grave and solemn enough 
to give to the common truths the impor- 
tance which they alone can have. The name 
of death is frequent in his pages, and humil- 
ity, the knowledge of limitation, the melan- 
choly of mature happiness, are always present : 
"With the fatigue and repetition of the in- 
numerable beauties of gold and color and 
carving and bronze, the sense of an exquisite 
art brings the indefinable sadness that be- 
longs to it, a feeling of humility and of the 
nothingness of man." The reader of artists' 



10 



145 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

books and letters will feel how typical this 
is of the creative painter, who loves to 
moralize, and who does it often better than 
the literary man. Sometimes Mr. La 
Farge's moralizings get away from him; but 
usually, with all their openness, they have a 
reserve and grace that put them high for 
literary art. To show how naturally they 
weave themselves into the subject, and at 
the same time to show the best of the author's 
style, take this passage from the letters from 
Japan : — 

" And I listened, until the blaze of the sun passed 
under the green film of the trees, to the fluting of 
the priests in the sanctuary on the hill. It was like 
a hymn to nature. The noise of the locusts had 
stopped for a time ; and this floating wail, rising and 
falling in unknown and incomprehensible modula- 
tions, seemed to belong to the forest as completely 
as their cry. The shrill and liquid song brought 
back the indefinite melancholy that one has felt 
with the distant sound of children's voices, singing 
of Sunday in drowsy rhythms. But these sounds 
belonged to the place, to its own peculiar genius — 
of a lonely beauty, associated with an indefinite past, 
little understood ; with death, and primeval nature, 
and final rest." 

"Why," asked a young sculptor the other 
day, " do painters write so well } " Genuine, 

146 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

serious, unpedantic thinking about impor- 
tant things removed from the accidents of 
daily civil life seems to be more common 
among workers in the plastic arts than among 
any other class, and it shows when they 
take up the pen. Their lives are devoted 
to ideas, which, unlike the literary men, 
they do not have to beat out thin for a 
living. Then, too, the long apprenticeship 
teaches them how much sacrifice any good 
work demands, and often as fun is heard in 
the studios flippancy is rare. It is experi- 
ence as well as imagination and culture that 
makes Mr. La Farge write so well. Never 
stirring, never emotional, his reflective 
calmness seems to be laden with knowledge 
of life. It is in the style itself: — 

'*Far away the sounds of pilgrims' clogs echoed 
from the steps of distant temples ; we heard the 
running of many waters. Above us a few crows, 
frequenters of temples, spotted the light for a 
moment, and their cries faded with them through 
the branches. A great, heavy, ugly caterpillar crept 
along the mossy edge of the balustrade, like the fresh 
incarnation of a soul which had to begin it all anew." 

Even when no moral truth is touched, the 
same impression comes sometimes from the 
unobtrusive music of the words, as in "a 

147 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

pleasantly managed balance of the full and 
empty spaces," or "whose worn surfaces 
contained marvels of passionate delicacy and 
care framed in noble lives." 

Although Mr. La Farge is always grave 
there are touches of light, which have their 
charm partly in the sobriety of their setting. 
There is also frequently a French freshness 
and pointedness of epithet that would be wit 
or epigram if it were not so restrained, as in 
the last of the modern painting tricks spoken 
of in this praise of the Japanese : — 

" Not knowing the science and art of perspective 
drawing, nor the power of representing shadows 
according to rule, nor having the habit of ruling 
lines with a ruler to give interest, nor of throwing 
little witty accents of dark to fill up blanks, they 
were perhaps the more obliged to concentrate their 
powers upon the end of the work ; and their real 
motive was the work itself." 

At the end of all this praise a reservation 
must be made; not the obvious one that 
Mr. La Farge is not constructive in criti- 
cism, that his wholes are not as good as 
some of his bits, but the more fundamental 
one that the style leaves the reader troubled, 
questioning its sincerity. The personality 
in it seems dual, its virtues appear to be 

148 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

part of the artist rather than of the man. 
The conscious mixture of frankness and 
reserve, the appreciation of every high work 
or impulse, the imaginative morality, the 
gravity, the harmony, the humility, seem to 
be there because they are the best things. 
They seem to be chosen. I cannot select 
passages to prove that, for it is an impres- 
sion instilled insidiously by the whole; but 
perhaps it is most definite when the author 
talks about himself. A warm admirer of La 
Farge, the artist once spoke of him as sur- 
passingly clever. That word seemed to give 
the key to my impression. The person has 
not gone into the style. It is not born; it 
is made. The man seems to be separated 
from the artist who selects the thoughts and 
phrases, choosing excellently. Pose it is 
not, yet it is a lack of innocence. It is sin- 
cere aesthetically and intellectually, rather 
than sincere with the force of an included 
character, and it is for this reason perhaps 
as much as because of the difference in per- 
ception and language that La Farge's fine 
passages, exceptionally just and beautiful as 
they are, have little of that rush of all-round 
living truth which in the words of a Fro- 
mentin may touch the heart of the most 
critical reader. 

149 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

III 

Kenyon Cox is in most ways the opposite of 
Mr. La Farge. His writing, mostly anony- 
mous and little known to the public, is felt 
by artists on account of the technical knowl- 
edge, clear and severe style, and fearless 
speech; but it is not only the victims of his 
rigor who do not wholly approve of his man- 
ner. An artist who received only high 
praise from him, spoke with coolness of his 
lawyer-like virtues. Some competent ob- 
servers would have criticism more sympa- 
thetic. It may well be answered that what 
Americans suffer most from is the leniency 
of their few authoritative critics. Not only 
do the newspaper reviewers praise under 
the guidance of the counting-room, but com- 
mentators of more eminence deal in the 
amenities to which they are tempted by per- 
sonal acquaintance with the producers of 
literature; and even of the few who do not 
lack courage, the greater part think that 
arts in their infant state should be treated 
with gentleness. Mr. Cox spoke of his 
companions in art with the unsoftened hon- 
esty which most intelligent critics confine in 
public to the dead, and apply only in private 
to the living. 

150 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

The past tense comes naturally, to express 
Mr. Cox's position, although he is still 
painting and writing in New York. It 
seems apt, because he has ceased to write 
much about the current picture exhibitions, 
the significant reason for this being, it is 
generally believed, that he found his radical 
experiment in frankness too uncomfortable 
and preferred silence to compliance. To 
the student, at least, there is a loss, and if 
competent and fearless criticism is favor- 
able alike for advance in art and in public 
taste, no critic was more needed. It must 
be said, however, that not all intelligent 
people took the same view of Mr. Cox's 
withdrawal. "Of course," said an admirer 
of him, — 

" Strictly just criticism is what is wanted where art 
is established, as in Europe. But in this country, 
to say practically, * A dozen of you are trying for 
the right thing, but only two of you have the 
natural gifts to reach it,' is the kind of frankness 
that blights. All who are trying for what is right 
should be encouraged and only false ideas treated 
severe." 

This question is obviously too large for 
dogmatism. 

To show the suggestiveness, concreteness, 
and bluntness of Mr. Cox's remarks on tech- 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

nical execution would take too many quota- 
tions. In praising or blaming conception, 
color, drawing, or any other element, he 
never has vague conclusions, but always 
definite ideas, well summed up in words and 
full of detail. The free tone in which he 
speaks of even his most prominent contem- 
poraries is shown in this remark: "Mr. Sar- 
gent is of all living painters perhaps the 
most consummate virtuoso. It is vain to 
look to him for thought, profundity, harmo- 
nies of tone or line; but Paginini was 
none the less great because he was not 
Beethoven, and Sargent is the Paginini of 
painting." Of Abbott Thayer he speaks in 
a characteristic way, combining appreciation 
of his good qualities with a frank statement 
of his defects : — 

" Here the manner is rough, heavy, and labored, 
and the color brown and lifeless, but the root of the 
matter is in it. One learns to look through the 
mannered and somewhat unpleasant technique, and 
one is rewarded by finding a depth and purity of 
sentiment which is delightful. One feels the charm 
of the wistful, childish faces, and one forgives every- 
thing else." 

To suggest his power of stating clearly a 
technical principle, one quotation must be 

152 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

relied upon. Mr. Van Dyck had spoken of 
blue as a luminous color, as shown in 
Monet's landscapes. Mr. Cox says: — 

*' It is precisely the least luminous of all colors, 
and that is why it is, as Mr. Van Dyck says, the 
* most unmanageable,' and why Reynolds formulated 
his rule, which Gainsborough defied, that it should 
be reserved for the shadows and never appear in the 
principal light of a picture. Blue is essentially a 
shadow, and that very fact, rightly understood, is 
the key to impressionists' use of it; for as never so 
little blue will at once produce the effect of shadow, 
one is enabled to paint on a much higher key with 
blue shadows than without. Instead of a difference 
in the degrees of remove from white, the impres- 
sionist merely gives a difference of tint, and so gets 
his whole canvas into the upper register and makes 
it the dazzling thing we know, while his pale blues, 
in spite of their paleness, still look like, and are, 
shadows. It is in the shadow alone that Ver Meer or 
the modern impressionists use their blue ; light they 
invariably render as warm in tone, yellow, or even 
pink, either of these colors being really ' more 
luminous than white,' which partakes of the cold 
nature of blue. It is the non-luminous nature of 
blue that makes a blue sky so hard to paint, and 
every decorator knows how blue kills the light of a 
room. It is only by breaking blue with all sorts of 
warmer tones, as Gainsborough did, that it can be 
made to express light at all." 

153 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

Even one who thinks this the kind of 
work which America needs should of course 
mark its limits. Honesty is not the only 
quality which keeps Mr. Cox from pleasing 
the public. To take hold of the people, 
the critic must generalize highly. His 
concrete judgments must be so set in ele- 
mentary principles, familiar to all, that they 
will seem but the text for the expounding 
of these fundamental ideas. This does not 
of necessity point to Ruskinism, although 
a large element of moralizing and obvious 
poetizing might be recommended in a recipe 
for criticism of which the appeal should be 
universal. Criticism may be humanized 
without being moralized. If Fromentin's 
perceptions were not given unity by strong 
feeling, by a distinct point of view, by the 
individuality, the personal element in his 
style, he would not with all his knowledge 
of painting and writing be the first of art 
critics. If Diderot had not connected pic- 
tures and statues with the other interests 
of life, he could not have led the intelli- 
gence of France to art as he did in the 
iMglitocnth Century. Fmotional sympathy, 
controlled but expressed, is needed to give 
the critic the ear of the world — moral 
imagination, ardor. The human tone is 

154 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

what Mr. Cox lacks. His style, strong, 
clear, free of moralizing and of guesswork, 
is not alive, but formal, merely intellectual. 
He certainly sees fundamental moral, men- 
tal, emotional elements in the artists with 
whom he deals, and handles them as fairly 
as he does technical methods, but that 
does not give similar qualities to his own 
presentation. Accuracy, simplicity, value 
to the student, are in this estimate of Turner 
no more clearly than is the lack of the more 
universal elements which make literature. 

"Turner's city is like one seen in a troubled 
dream, — luridly magnificent, but rankly impossible 
in every line. Repose is carefully eliminated, and 
mass is everywhere subdivided into an endless mass 
of confusing and benumbing details ; church spires 
are lifted to a Babel-like elevation ; the bridge across 
the river becomes Cyclopean in its stride ; every- 
thing is colossal, yet wavering and uncertain, like a 
city in the clouds at sunset — and, like such a city, 
one expects to see it dissolve and transform itself 
before one's eyes. 

"That this is a work of strong imagination no 
one can deny ; but whether or not it is that of a 
great or healthy imagination is a different question. 
To us the imagination of Turner seems an emi- 
nently morbid and — let us risk the word — theatri- 
cal one. His conception of art was scenic and 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

spectacular ; his mind was operatic. Many of his 
Httle vignettes seem Hke sketches for the scenery of 
?\.feerie^ and he would have been the greatest scene- 
painter that ever lived. His natural endowment 
was great, his knowledge of nature profound ; but 
his carelessness of truth was supreme, and his influ- 
ence, wherever exercised, has been almost unmixedly 
for evil." 

This summary, strong as it is, approaches 
a danger often connected with the power 
of vigorous writing, — the heightening of 
contrasts, the omission of reservations, in 
order to be striking. The student does not 
care. He is looking less for a judgment 
that is absolutely judicial than for inside 
light on art, and he gets more from the 
expert whose conclusion is wrong than 
from the ignorant person who is right ; how- 
ever irrelevant the standards of the expert 
may be to the picture he is judging. Mr. 
Cox says of the Assumption : " It is clumsy, 
and posed in its arrangement, the figures are 
common in type and (several of them) badly 
drawn, the color is bright with the bright- 
ness of stained glass, thin and lacking in 
quality. . . . The ' Presentation ' is flat and 
hard and commonplace, and the others are 
grimy and brown and woolly, and common- 
place too." That maybe true, but it may 

156 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

well be said that Titian is not adequately 
accounted for. Mr. Cox is frankly a student 
neither of the public nor of the past. " The 
earlier men, the Vivarini and the rest, and 
even Gentile Bellini and the much lauded 
Carpaccio, may, by all but the historical 
student of art, be entirely neglected." 
His judgment does not change with the time 
or the artist. He is always Kenyon Cox, a 
New York painter of to-day, clear-headed, 
sturdy, educated, applying the standards of 
contemporary execution to all time and 
every place. In praise it is the same. Of 
Pallas and Mars he says : — 

" The fulness and glow of color is Titian at his 
best, but Titian with a difference — Titian inclining 
to the blue and green of the scale and away from 
the red and yellow. The richness of light and 
shade, the glow of the lovely knees and rounded 
arms, and the transparent depths of shadow, are like 
Correggio, but a Correggio of more daring invention, 
and shorn of the affectations and prettinesses adored 
of school girls. The lithe suppleness of full muscled 
form, the adorable distinction of the delicately poised 
heads, with their shining braids of golden-brown hair, 
the firm hands, with their square-ended fingers — 
these are Tintoretto and none other ; one of the 
first painters of all time when he took the time to 
be so." 

157 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

Inspiriting as this is, it does not touch 
what makes Tintoretto part of the world's 
history. To appreciate Mr. Cox is to see 
what a narrow ground he stands upon, at the 
same time that one sees how few occupy it ; 
and after all the limitations are drawn, he 
remains a bracing and regulating critic. 
He respects success in the solution of a 
given problem, and knows it when he sees 
it ; and therefore he is as much needed now 
as others who have what he lacks, — the love 
of beauty and of poetry. 

IV 

In any criticism an interesting element is 
the personality of the critic, and in no con- 
temporary American criticism is there a 
fuller character than there is in the style 
and substance of Mrs. Van Rensselaer's 
writing. The quality, therefore, which 
her style has in a pre-eminent degree, 
is the sense of life and some of the best 
personal elements. Her constant improve- 
ment in technical skill shows devotion to the 
demands of words and phrases ; but, after all, 
her work remains of the kind which leaves 
the reader with a respect for literature, but 
a realization of its littleness in comparison 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

to its subject. To give the elements of her 
own power, it may be enough to quote her 
praise of another : — 

"I knew of no more delightful place than his 
studio, where one forgot the art, almost, in one's 
interest in the man — or felt it to be merely a part, 
a fragment, an incomplete revelation, of a most 
attractive personahty, a most intelligent mind, a 
most warm and honest heart. He loved his art as 
few men love it even among artists ; and he seemed 
to love humanity as do few of us, I fear, in any 
walk of life. A talk with him was one of the best 
spurs to effort, to energy, to enthusiasm of a clear- 
sighted and not a maudlin kind, that an artist or a 
critic could receive. No one could be careless or 
apathetic, unreasoning or hypercritical, in George 
Fuller's Company — no one could forget the pleas- 
ure and responsibility of his work whether that work 
were painting or mere commentary." 

How many critics can be so serious with- 
out loss.'' In how many is earnest feeling 
at once strength and fineness.? Although 
much that can be learned shows in this 
style, its worth is the way of seeing the 
world, the something that gives importance 
to elementary things said simply. The 
words tell us that the writer has felt keenly, 
and seen with an intelligence which is 
kind. We know that frivolous things are 

159 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

not part of her, that even her humor is 
dignified. One kind of earnestness is the 
most depressing fault, one rare kind the 
highest faculty. Mrs. Van Rensselaer, who 
writes for the general public, sometimes 
mars her pages by the direct teaching style, 
but this roughness of form almost disappears 
in the general tone of gravity and experi- 
ence, of enthusiasm controlled by a sense of 
what cannot be said. 

Simplicity is the natural expression of 
such a nature. Her words are common ones, 
not infrequently repeated. There is little 
ornament, no over subtle idea. Many of 
her pages are admirably written technically, 
as well as essentially, but the finish is 
seldom obtrusive: — 

" I have, indeed, seen one or two Japanese 
pictures where a weeping willow looked very well. 
There it overhung a cascade ; and it looked well 
because the falling lines of water harmonized with 
its own lines — because, so to say, the cascade ex- 
cused its abnormal shape. If you have a little cas- 
cade, then, plant a little weeping willow ; or if you 
have a big waterfall, encourage a weeping willow to 
grow big beside it ; but do not allow one to shed 
its tears in the centre of your lawn, or to mingle its 
weak pendulousness with the sturdier, more normal 
forms of the trees in your foreground group or your 

i6o 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

forest-like plantation. It can never form an assent, 
like a Lombardy poplar ; it can only form a contrast 
and, almost invariably, an inharmonious one. It is 
out of all relation with soft round-headed trees, 
and still more with angularly spreading or aspiring 
trees." 

As unaffected as this and yet as far from 
artless, the style seems born no less of expe- 
rience than of character. Frankness, expan- 
sion, amiability are in it, but above them 
are discretion, practical wisdom, and taste, 
the weight of experience of many sides of 
life. It seems to me of minor importance 
that Mrs. Van Rensselaer writes mainly 
about art. Whatever might have been her 
subject, the attraction would have been the 
same. One who reads her essay on " People 
in New York," or her story called "One 
Man Who was Happy," will see this attrac- 
tion at its best. Her knowledge of life, 
from fashion to the slums, her interest in 
all its forms, is not so much the cause as 
the result of the quality which makes her 
charm. Active political v/ork and histori- 
cal research simply fit into the same virtue, 
sane but earnest intelligence applied to 
those subjects which are most important 
to . the race. Literature that does not 
seem like an overflow of life may be charm- 
II i6i 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

ing, but it is not impressive. An instinc- 
tive sense of the reality of the world, a 
point of view near the centre, is needed to 
allow the individual to borrow some of the 
world's momentum. "Henry James," said 
a clever man to me, "has hopelessly handi- 
capped himself by taking for the centre of 
his world the country house, which is not 
the centre of the universe." Mrs. Van 
Rensselaer's feeling for life, for the mass of 
men as the world on which classes, intellec- 
tual as well as social, are but hills and 
valleys, has given her some of her faults as 
an artist, notably some needless explanation, 
but that, with the other defects of form with 
which she started, has rapidly decreased with 
work ; so that in the writing of the last two 
years the form is a comparatively adequate 
channel for the nobility of thought and feel- 
ing. The words every year carry more and 
more uninterruptedly the breadth, the 
warmth, the understanding of fundamentals, 
the kindness that make her essays and her 
stories live. With all this seriousness there 
goes the loyalty to art which makes her, as 
she says in her article on Stevenson, rewrite 
not less than thirty times to make a passage 
satisfactory to her in sound as well as in 
sense. Some faults there will always be, 

162 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

but they have little to do with the rare 
combination of sincerity and delicacy of 
feeling, earnestness and constancy of effort, 
clearness and lack of digression in thought, 
which combine into a vital style. To quote 
again her words of another : — 

" A philosopher very wise in that most precious 
kind of lore which gives the soul modesty and poise, 
cheerfulness, humor, and courage ; a student of 
human nature, not with classification and categories 
to fill out, but with a special welcoming niche pre- 
pared for the reception of each new human soul ; 
a 'detached intelligence,' but a heart intimately 
attached to every palpitant fibre in the web of 
existence, which loved to love, and chose for its 
hatred only fundamentally hateful and harmful 
things like hypocrisy, vanity, intolerance, and cow- 
ardice in the face of life." 

After the death of the same man, Steven- 
son, she wrote : " In our little world of art, 
in our strenuous little world of oft-defrauded 
but perennial aspiration, I feel that there 
will never again be quite as much joy in the 
technical struggle." But greater always 
than her interest in the technical struggle is 
her care for people, " the motley pageant of 
the. streets," as she says, the life outside as 
well as in. "... to see the rich of New 

163 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

York in all their gorgeousness one must 
visit Central Park of a pleasant afternoon. 
I like to do this myself, in the finest car- 
riage owned by any of my friends, and to 
pretend that nothing else could suit me quite 
so well." Then, more seriously, comes the 
interest in "those who are helping to turn 
the wheels of the big, busy, experimenting 
world." To find the gravest note, read 
"One Man Who was Happy," on the one 
hand, and on the other, the end of "People 
in New York," both full of personal feel- 
ing; one for the individual, the other for a 
class. 

" Do you know that the tiny gifts in money and 
food which pass from almost empty to quite empty 
hands in this town of ours must exceed in their 
noble aggregate the lordly sums that our rich folks 
give in charity ? . . . You might see dreadful things 
in the streets of this region, more dreadful things in 
its flaming bar-rooms and dance-halls, things most 
dreadful and pitiful beyond words in its damp and 
filthy cellars, in its naked attics, which are cold past 
sufferance in winter, and in summer pestilential with 
a tropic heat. And now you might hear the des- 
perate cry, * Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for 
to-morrow we die,' and again the still more desper- 
ate moan, ' Help us to eat, drink, and be warm, 
just for once — for we are dying to-day.' " 

164 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

To come back to the contrast again; all 
this is in the woman who speaks of "that 
natural love for pretty things which assails 
even the least extravagant of my sex," whose 
articles in a New "^^ork newspaper led the 
opposition to woman suffrage at the time of 
the agitation there, whose pen has carried 
weight in many political changes, who in 
many branches of art, although not an ex- 
pert, is a scholar. The feminine quality is 
in every page, making more striking the pic- 
ture of what one woman can do. The kind- 
ness is feminine, the seriousness, the humor, 
the taste, all are necessarily feminine since 
all are personal. It is a striking case of a 
character steadily conquering a mode of 
expression, not by the method of putting 
into the words only what would easily go 
into them, but by working at them until 
they received the whole personality with its 
exceptional richness. All this is essentially 
praise of her work as literature; but that 
work has its place as interesting criticism, 
because the appreciation and the power which 
have counted for so much in New York life, 
have been put in such large part into making 
art ideas alive to a class of readers who 
could only be effectively reached by a per- 
son whose point of view was widely human. 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

V 

Among contemporary Americans Mr. Brown- 
ell is the best representative of the powers 
and the shortcomings of one very distinct 
kind of literature, which gains its strength 
from culture and has the weaknesses of such 
an origin. There are more critics funda- 
mentally of his sort in England, and there 
are some with superficial resemblances to 
him in France, because it is from the litera- 
ture of France that he has drawn largely for 
his education. This special study of French 
literature, conspicuous now in American and 
English critical minds, gives usually lucidity 
and prudence; but it instigates the attempt 
to assimilate qualities which seldom enter 
organically into superior English style, such 
as the studied emphasis of the epithet and 
the manner of intellectual sprightliness. 
Although, however, French models are not 
aids to permanent English literature, the 
general level of current writing is doubtless 
being raised by the study of them. Senti- 
mental rhetoric and heavy truism are killed 
by it. Respect for attainment, for skill, for 
expert opinion is instilled by it. In " French 
Traits," Mr. Brownell's thought seems more 
the result of immediate observation, al- 

i66 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

though there too it owes much to good books 
or to good company; and in " French Art," 
we get, not copied but chosen and reflected, 
some of those clear, permanent ideas which 
are the heritage of culture, to which, now 
and then, some original critic adds some- 
thing; so that those who never get to the 
sources, to " Maitres d'Autrefois," for in- 
stance, to Millet's letters, to a dozen other 
springs, to the talk of living painters, miss, 
if they read "French Art," much less than 
if they do not ; for in it are given with dig- 
nity and purity the lasting conceptions, 
slowly accumulated, of the best general 
criticism; points of view merely burlesqued 
by many more popular English writers. 

Mr. Brownell's style is studied; it verges 
on epigram. " To be adequate to the require- 
ments — rarely very exacting in any case — 
made of one; never to show stupidity; to 
have a great deal of taste and an instinctive 
feeling for what is elegant and refined; to 
abhor pedantry and take gayety at once 
lightly and seriously; and beyond this to 
take no thought, is to be clever. . . ." 
That, I think, is a pleasing definition, with 
just enough lightness to fit its subject. The 
power of pressing a whole point of view into 
a few phrases without being pyrotechnic is 

167 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

shown in an extract, much of which might 
apply to the kind of literature which he 
himself makes. 

" The neo-Greek painters are thoroughly educated. 
They lack the picturesque and unexpected note of 
their poetic brethren — they lack the moving and 
interpreting, the elevating and exquisite touch of 
these ; nay, they lack the penetrating distinction 
that radiates even from rusticity itself when it is 
inspired and transfigured as it appears in such works 
as those of Millet and Rousseau. But their dis- 
tinction is not less real for being the distinction of 
cultivation rather than altogether native and abso- 
lute. It is, perhaps, even more marked, more per- 
suasive, more directly associated with the painter's 
aim and effect. One feels that they are familiar 
with the philosophy of art, its history and practice, 
that they are articulate and eclectic, that for being 
less personal and powerful their horizon is less 
limited, their purely intellectual range, at all events, 
and in many cases their aesthetic interest, wider. 
They have more the cultivated man's bent for ex- 
perimentation, for variety. They care more scru- 
pulously for perfection, for form. With a far 
inferior sense of reality and far less felicity in 
dealing with it, their sapient skill in dealing with 
the abstractions of art is more salient. To be blind 
to their successful handling of line and mass and 
movement, is to neglect a sense of refined pleasure. 
To lament their lack of poetry is to miss their ad- 

i68 

/ 
/ 

/ 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

mirable rhetoric ; to regret their imperfect feel- 
ing for decorativeness is to miss their delightful 
decorum." 

This long quotation gives a glimpse, not 
only of Mr. Brown^ll's powers, of his pene- 
tration, firm style, faultless syntax, of his 
clear ideas held with ease and measure, but 
also of his minor failures in the use of his 
own manner. "Sapient skill," the contrast 
of ** decorativeness " with "delightful deco- 
rum," are each unobjectionable; but before 
one of his books is finished, the reader sees 
enough obvious alliteration to make him 
restless, and " sapient " is one of the words, 
like "suave" and "puissant, " which appear 
with an insistence that is depressing, espe- 
cially when variety might be given by bet- 
ter words, more ruggedly English. Other 
words, good in themselves, less suggestive 
of French reading, words which are fashion- 
able in the vocabulary of contemporary cul- 
ture, are worked too hard ; among them, in 
their special applications to art, "compos- 
ure," "reserve," "reticence," "stark," and 
"elegance." In judging one whose powers 
are shown largely in the selection of words, 
it is certainly not beside the mark to lay some 
emphasis on these little flaws of execution. 
Robert Louis Stevenson, perhaps the prince 

169 



Ll'I'KR A K Y Sr A TJuSMKN 

of those who sulxhic laii<^ua^c word by word, 
never learned to conceal his art. 

Trifling failures in this kind of skill raise 
the lart;er question of tlie value of this writ- 
ing", the ])erfectiou of which is gained by 
studying the details of language. What is 
the style worth of Stevenson himself? It is 
a broail (|uestion, insoluble and interesting, 
the c-onipaial ive woitli of tlie style of culture, 
compared to the style tliat is a man, the 
style of inspiration. Does Stevenson have 
anywhere the blood that flows through the 
easy, unstudied sentences of writers whose 
minds were on their results, not on their 
tools, by whom words were used almost as 
unconsciously as Icttcis? Can any self- 
made writer stand permanently with the 
spontaneous ones, with P'ielding, with Swift, 
De l'\)e, or Scott ? in criticism the answer 
is less certain; but even there the great 
styles, those Tor instance of Hacon, Dryden, 
Thackeray, hancrson, Lamb, si^cm to grow 
out o( the \(\c:i, witli an occasional ])ause 
for a woril, not out of a j^reoccupation 
with phrases. Tlie consciousness of one's 
language leads naturally to an attcmi)t to 
overloail {\\c epithet, making what one of 
my friends called "adjective literature." 
However, this cmpliasis of the details of 

I 70 



AMERICAN ART CRITICISM 

style is intelligent, instructive, fit to leaven 
our present crudity. It has not the unity 
given by a mastering thought, only a little 
piece of the writer goes into his phrases, 
a studied fragment of his conscious thought, 
poor by necessity in comparison to the style 
used unconsciously and inevitably as a man's 
native tongue. 

Of course the attempt to judge a writer 
by standards so high is in itself praise, and 
Mr. Brownell will hardly be praised too 
much. "Poise," says he, "is perhaps the 
one essential element of criticism." It is 
at least an essential, and one which he has 
to the full. Romantic and classic art, initi- 
ation and tradition, are given equal justice 
by him, and even such persons as Bougereau 
and Cabanel have their meed of apprecia- 
tion. Perhaps the thing most difficult for 
him to weigh objectively is crudity, but 
" P^ench Traits " almost contents one who 
accepts with satisfaction America as it is. 
On the other hand, in the wide range of 
his three books, there is, I believe, but one 
infatuation, — his admiration for the sculptor 
Rodin. In this artist all of Mr. Brownell's 
comparisons must be with the giants of 
thought, mainly with Michelangelo; and 
although the superiority of the Frenchman 

171 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

is not stated, as Mr. Brownell never decides 
the relative values of contrasted styles, the 
exposition of the Frenchman's art, contrasted 
with that of Michelangelo, is so ardent that 
it is a solitary break in the sustained judicial 
tone; in that careful, comprehensive appre- 
ciation of diverse qualities which gives value 
to his opinions and dignity to his language. 
To describe his point of view more narrowly, 
— it is that of the literary man of intelli- 
gence; not the painter's, by any means, 
although touched sometimes with studio lan- 
guage ; still less that of the man who is blind 
to the differences between the standpoint of 
the painter and those of the moralist and 
poet ; but that of the literary man in a fairer 
sense, broad enough to see what the painter 
thinks, what the many kinds of spectators 
think, and personal enough to know what 
he thinks himself. 
1896. 



172 



AMERICAN COSMOPOLI- 
TANISM 



VI 

AMERICAN COSMOPOLI- 
TANISM 

At a time when so many new ideas about 
the humanities are flooding America, it is not 
surprising that among our ambitious young 
men of the first generation of culture are 
many whose intellectual methods show more 
eagerness than measure. With no traditions 
behind them they do not realize how nec- 
essary are humility, repose, and care to sound 
ripening of the perceptions and the judgment. 
As their fathers struggled for academic edu- 
cation or for material ease, the sons make a 
struggle of ideas on art. They over-empha- 
size what they get hold of, from a deficient 
sense of permanent values. Though this 
spectacle has been seen at other times, per- 
haps never before was so large a mass of new 
ideas thrown to so hungry a public. 

The men of whom I speak are more occu- 
pied with the idea of enlightenment than with 
the things which give light. Americans give 

175 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

too much importance to intellectual things, it 
is frequently said. Riper intelligence puts 
less emphasis on itself. When we first see 
beyond others about us we are dazzled by the 
idea of our own advancement. This often 
makes us set ourselves up as enemies of the 
Philistines and of all their ways. What is 
known to all or felt by all is unimportant. 
Distinction consists in seeing and believing 
novel things. 

" I the heir of all the ages 
In the foremost files of time." 

Of the young prophets of culture whom I 
know, all Americans, some living in Europe, 
some by necessity in America, every one 
thinks that the only art of to-day is French or 
Japanese ; that there has never been any art 
in England ; that the most advanced literature 
of the world is the realism of the younger 
men in Paris ; that there is much less beauty 
in nature than in art ; that work in any un- 
artistic employment is a waste of life ; and 
that it is impossible for an intelligent man to 
be contented in America. The saying that 
the French would be the best cooks in Europe 
if they had any butcher's meat, modified by 
Mr. Bagehot into the aphorism that they 
would be the best writers of the day if they 

176 



COSMOPOLITANISM 

had anything to say, applies also to these 
critics who make such striking theories out 
of so little. 

Of course the case can be stated more sym- 
pathetically ; for instance, let us suppose a 
youth known in college as a man of taste 
comes back from some years in Italy to go 
into the practice of a profession. His work 
now is intellectual, but as far as possible 
from artistic ; and he had cared only for 
artistic things. His present work requires en- 
ergy, attention to practical details, and logic. 
Among his companions he finds none who 
have his instincts and his training. Beautiful 
surroundings, friends with leisure and taste, 
art, music, literature, had seemed necessities 
to him. To adjust himself to his conditions 
here and be happy does not seem possible. 
The cities have less art than European cap- 
itals, and repel him by their noise and lack 
of sensuous beauty. Perhaps he chooses 
to give up the pursuit of happiness, sink 
himself in work, and make his life a routine. 

His case is not an easy one, but it may be 
contrasted with that of a young girl I knew 
who went from a small city to a great uni- 
versity and won a reputation as a writer, a 
talker, and a painter. Her friends believed 
that" she needed only opportunity to do much 

12 177 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

in art. Paris was a paradise to her. But she 
never went there. She was compelled to re- 
turn to her home, where there is no art and no 
intelligent society. At first it seemed to her 
a moral death. Her imagination was so vital, 
however, that it soon began to enjoy its own 
power, even in its narrow home. The girl 
who had dreamed of the studios of Paris, the 
conversation, the gayety, the freedom, the 
art, is happy now with nothing but what she 
can get from a routine home life and child- 
like companions. She drives about the streets 
and looks at the spectacle of life as it is in the 
little city. She takes part in the occupations 
of society, she delights in seeing people move 
and think, as she delights in watching fowls 
or insects. Perhaps the power to express is 
dying in her; she cannot tell, though she 
tries to keep it alive for the possible oppor- 
tunity. But though the disappointment is 
heavy still, life itself seems the great thing to 
her now, so rich in its barest spots that it is 
worth all one's powers. Excitement, joy, 
fame, are gone for her, perhaps, but a deep 
seriousness has kept her happy. Of course, 
if she can, she will take the other goods, — 
for though less, they are additions ; and she 
knows that now she would be in no danger 
of losing the essential outlines in the details. 

178 



COSMOPOLITANISM 

Such a reconciled way of accepting lim- 
ited opportunities seems to some who have 
settled permanently abroad perfunctory and 
provincial. It would not do to draw too 
radical conclusions from a score of examples; 
but it may be that perfect freedom of oppor- 
tunity weakens as many as it develops. 
One man of wealth, with some taste and with 
no talent, bought a villa in Italy, and has 
never returned to America. His whole 
horizon seems to go no further than Italian 
art. If he takes a walk in the mountains, he 
judges the beautiful only from the point of 
view of its suitability to the painter. The 
Alps are not beautiful, because they cannot 
be painted. A scene is not beautiful, be- 
cause the blue of the lake is in a different 
key from the blue of the sky. His world lies 
in a picture frame. Whenever he meets an 
interesting American, he tries to induce 
him to stay in Italy, where alone, he thinks, 
true culture can be acquired. America, he 
says, is in the dark ages, — a nation of 
Chinamen. Intellect at our universities is 
scholastic, dry, without life. Life for him 
is Italian history, talk about painting, the 
slang of an art-world in which he is an out- 
sider, a hanger-on, a new-comer. The real 
citizens of that world, it need hardly be said, 

179 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

have no such narrowness. The talk, the 
standards, of the true artist are not obtru- 
sively artistic. These young American 
prophets of expatriation (there are many of 
them) are in striking contrast to the thing 
they imitate, though they impress many who 
cannot understand the original. The real 
seer of the beautiful, who, perhaps, has 
painted and starved in many lands, settles 
almost anywhere and becomes happy. New 
York is full of such men. They find beau- 
ties on our ugliest streets, which the pseudo- 
culture of their imitators could not see in 
Naples or in Paris. 

Among the most exaggerated of the 
prophets of culture by one path only are 
the women. Their philosophy is likely to 
be even further from life, for it comes often 
from their men friends, who parody it from 
the originals. I have heard a number of 
women, living about the cheaper places of 
Europe on small incomes or the lower order 
of hack work, solemnly preaching the doc- 
trine that " life " is in one place and not 
in another. Of course it is the rule that 
those who have come from the narrowest en- 
vironment are the fiercest converts. They 
furnish many rather sad pictures of the 
check of the deep instincts of their sex 

i8o 



COSMOPOLITANISM 

for the painful forcing of some intellectual 
absurdities. 

We see the expression of these things in 
journals recently founded all over the coun- 
try, which, in an average life of a few months, 
express the opinions and reveal the art of a 
few young men who think they are ahead of 
their times. Just now the main character- 
istic of this literature is that it suggests as 
often as it can the art of painting. It calls 
itself by the name of a color, — yellow, green, 
purple, gray. Constant use is made of the 
slang of art. Indeed, their only way of 
appearing artistic seems to be to make their 
writing as far as possible remind the reader 
of the plastic arts. Art is ostentatiously 
opposed to everything else, especially to 
scholarship, morality, and industry. The 
idea seems to be that art is made by talking 
about art, or by talking about life in terms 
of art. Equally noticeable is the instinct 
that in making one special quality conspic- 
uous by neglecting others, they are showing 
originality. They do not see that in an 
artist great enough to give a large man the 
feeling of life there are too many elements 
for any detail to be conspicuous. The work 
of this artist will be life-like, commonplace, 
unless seen by an eye to which common life 

i8i 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

reveals its interests. Edmond de Goncourt 
can see nothing in "The Scandinavian 
Hamlet." He prefers "P^re Goriot," who 
is newer, he thinks, and more real. Edmond 
de Goncourt is an admirable example of the 
attitude of a few men in Paris who have 
largely influenced some of our tawdry litera- 
ture. In one of his journals he remarks 
sadly that in a certain conversation about 
abstract things, general human points of view, 
he failed to shine ; and he asks plaintively 
why it is that men who " on all other sub- 
jects " find original things to say are in these 
generalities on a footing with the rest of the 
world : which means to him, flat. Readers 
of the eight volumes of the journal may 
smile at the "all other subjects," but it is at 
least true that on certain narrow topics of 
which few persons know anything, he could 
feel more profound than he could on subjects 
of universal human interest. His test of 
Shakspere, by the way, is an apt one. It 
does not condemn a man that he does not 
find Hamlet interesting. Many intelligent 
men do not. Any man, however, who infers, 
from his lack of appreciation, that Shakspere 
is not a great artist, is deficient in critical 
intelligence and in understanding of the 
value of evidence. And when a man remarks 

182 



COSMOPOLITANISM 

that Raphael, Beethoven, or Shakspere, was 
a great man in his time, but that '^^ world 
has progressed, and that, as we stand on the 
shoulders of our predecessors, the Balzac of 
this century sees more than the Shakspere of 
two centuries earlier, we have a subject for 
comedy. That any critic who seriously 
treats with contempt any man or any institu- 
tion that has a high place in the general 
world of ideas is shallow, an avoider and 
not a solver of questions which confront a 
man of mature culture and broad mind, is 
almost axiomatic. When we hear so many 
critics to-day expressing scorn of whole 
nations, — saying of England, perhaps, that 
she has no art, of Germany that she has only 
dull learning, of America that she is Philis- 
tine ; when we see these critics surrounded 
by groups of followers, do we not wish, with 
some reason, that we had a Moli^re to-day.^ 
What a play he could make of " Les Critiques 
Ridicules;" or of "L'ficole des iEsth^tes," 
or of " L* Americain Malgre Lui. " 

It would be unfair, however, to leave the 
impression that all Americans who dislike 
their country are small. It is probably true 
that any man who is capable of sinking 
deeply into life has often a strong feeling for 
the instincts and prejudices of his race ; but 

183 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

it is not less true that some men of genuine 
intellectual passion find other things out- 
weigh these sympathies, and live with most 
happiness and fullest growth in foreign lands. 
But men of whom this is true are usually not 
the ones whose feelings about America are 
acid. The bitter berating of any country as 
Phihstine is usually the mark of shallowness. 
A New York artist not long ago was speaking 
of an acquaintance who had been telling how 
he hated America and wanted to get back to 
Europe. *' Think of it," exclaimed the artist, 
who was born in Europe and loves it, " he has 
lived in New York thirty years, and he hates 
America ! " That is a whole philosophy. The 
person who can live in a great city so long 
and not find beauty and meaning is a small 
person. A strong man may say that he 
would prefer something else, but that will 
not keep him from feeling the fulness of life 
where he is. 

Even to-day a good deal of blame for the 
failure of many of their graduates to adapt 
themselves readily to their occupations is put 
upon the universities, not by unthinking Phil- 
istines, but by men of comparative liberality. 
Of course the days when active men in general 
looked with entire distrust on college gradu- 
ates are gone ; but many men who think that 

184 



COSMOPOLITANISM 

a college education is almost essential to-day, 
believe its advantages are partly offset by the 
impetus it gives to this kind of discontent 
with our conditions. It is undoubtedly true 
that the prominence of the intelHgent dilet- 
tante spirit often makes it harder to take up a 
burden in the world. But to look upon this 
as a serious misfortune is hardly more intelli- 
gent than the old-time suspicion of all college 
training. The youth who for several years 
had roamed unfettered, talking art and litera- 
ture, studying what he liked, dreaming of 
distant scenes, is often for a few years after 
graduation an unhappy creature and a forlorn 
spectacle; but when he does turn from his 
dreams of other things to an effort to find 
beauty and interest in what is forced upon 
him, he finds more than he would have done 
without the experience. 

Exactly the same thing is true, probably, 
of foreign training that is true of the influence 
of the colleges. The men who have seen 
doubt have in the end the clearest faith. 
Many of our young teachers, for instance, 
who are furnishing the hard work as well as 
the guidance in the educational changes being 
made in all of our American colleges are Har- 
vard men who for a time after graduation 
wandered about the Louvre, or drank beer in 

185 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

Berlin, or idled sweetly in Italy, dreading the 
need of returning. It is true also of some of 
our ablest young lawyers and journalists, and 
of men in other occupations, — though un- 
doubtedly the men who get this spirit strong 
upon them and cannot earn a living in any 
of the arts are more likely to go into law, 
journahsm, or teaching than into any other 
work. 

Americans are accused of being superficial 
in education and in the conduct of life. Prob- 
ably the men who will remove this reproach 
are not those who take instinctively to the 
methods and the point of view that grew out 
of the rapid setthng of a raw country, but 
those who feel deeply the attraction of the 
slower, riper thoughts and feelings of the 
older countries ; and among those, of course, 
the ones who after a time are able to use this 
insight on the actual material about them, — 
not to bring foreign culture here, like a grown 
plant, for it is not transplantable, but to get 
its seed, to use their knowledge of foreign 
things as one element of a new perception 
of their environment. Goethe's well-known 
statement that he never deemed any truth his 
until he had himself conquered it is applicable 
everywhere. It is well for us to take what 
information we can from any source; but 

i86 



COSMOPOLITANISM 

before it will do us good we must learn to 
find it over again in the things which we 
see and work with. Our deepest knowledge 
of life must be our first-hand perceptions, 
must come from daily sights and experiences. 
The man who lives in New York and thinks 
in London or in Rome guesses at life. 

The question, of course, remains, whether 
one can say that every artist, or every student 
of life, will grow best where he was planted. 
The young artist who wishes a mass of im- 
pressions and instructions from Europe only 
to come back and spend a life in trying to 
understand from the inside the New England 
people, has a truth that is vital; but is it 
universal? It is one thing to say, "If you 
must return, you get most by putting your 
heart and mind into your surroundings." It 
is another thing to say, " Though you have 
the opportunity to live in any place you 
choose, v/isdom orders you to live in your 
native land." 

Though the extreme position is taken ,in- 
stinctively by many intelligent Americans, it 
can hardly stand the bald statement. One 
may argue : " The cosmopolitan is on the 
outside of things everywhere; he knows a 
great many things that are not worth know- 
ing ; his knowledge and his instincts are not 

187 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

in harmony ; therefore he has no fundamental 
insight." Another may call this provincial or 
mystical. He may say : *' It is as absurd to 
make such divisions by countries as it would 
be by counties. The more widely one sees 
the world, the more deeply he understands 
it." Each generalization must be untrue for 
some. Perhaps neither in its extreme form 
is true for many. 

The question as applied to artists often 
ends, in discussions among young Ameri- 
cans, in an issue on the case of Mr. Henry 
James. He is the favorite example of an 
American cosmopolitan. Some who like his 
work say that, however delicate and skilful it 
may be, it is not large or important, because 
it is remote ; it deals with no instincts shared 
by large masses of people ; it is the talk of a 
man who has floated about, touching various 
societies, sinking into none, and recording, 
therefore, nothing but a fringe, the minor 
differences of the outside, gaining none of 
the rich color that so subtle and so sensitive 
a mind would have drawn from a life of 
natural responsibilities and prejudices. The 
answer is to take issue on the facts. Mr. 
James, says the cosmopolitan, has a more 
real insight, a fairer judgment, for his lack of 
attachment. The other attitude is partisan; 

i88 



COSMOPOLITANISM 

it is made intense by its lack of perspective ; 
it is passionate because it is narrow. The 
large mind, unprejudiced and serene, chooses 
its goods from all the world and its friends 
from all mankind. 

Obviously it is an individual matter. Mr. 
James may have done his best work with 
the life he has led, as Emerson may have 
done his best by the opposite course. Mr. 
Whistler may be living under the most favor- 
able circumstances as surely as is Mr. Winslow 
Homer. Any sweeping rule is inadequate to 
the facts. One can perhaps say little more 
than that a man working his life out fully 
either way will have no impulse either to 
scorn or to envy the other method. 

Granting all this, however, granting that 
some individuals will do better away from 
home, the fact remains to move our imagina- 
tions, that when our greatest artists come they 
will be no exceptions to the rule which has 
been illustrated by the other nations of the 
world. Probably these artists will come the 
sooner for any culture that leads our young 
men to study deeply real life about them, — 
to rejoice, like the strong artist, in fresh 
fields. A deep enough understanding will 
bring literature and art out of the millions 
of" people of all races crowded into our great 

189 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

cities. To be a great artist, a man must know 
his world so intimately that he does not ex- 
press it on purpose. He does not go to work 
to give the character of his people or his town. 
He talks about the simple, universal subjects, 
and his environment is given inevitably, with- 
out conscious effort, in every line he writes. 
The style is not the man only; it is the 
country, the race. To this height, to the 
largest poetry, cosmopolitanism has never 
reached. The constant record of compari- 
sons is a slight thing before the work of the 
national artist, steeped in the color of a race, 
profoundly conscious of definite social and 
political conditions as realities, not as spec- 
tacles. It is a good education, the cosmo- 
politan training and instinct, a good influence 
for us, a refinement, a stimulant; but most of 
us who cannot have it should not take the 
deprivation as an essential one. Moreover, 
and more important from the general point 
of view if not from that of the individual, 
the most interesting men are not made by 
cosmopolitan training. They grow in the 
soil. 
1896. 



190 



HENRY JAMES 



VII 

HENRY JAMES 

The ironical attitude, according to Mr. Henry 
James, is the attitude of the artist ; an opinion 
which may well be startling until one learns 
that the artist is one thing and the poet its 
opposite. With irony, in his own sense, Mr. 
James is impregnated. The unusual shadings 
given to words, the complicated and facile 
syntax, the broken sentences in dialogue, that 
suggest a shrug, the frequent French, the ir- 
relevant parentheses, the completions that are 
so close to repetitions, — all these have the 
airiness of irresponsibility about them. Mr. 
James does not crash into the heart of a 
thought with a noun. He hovers about it, 
pricks it here, with delicacy, then there, so 
near that sometimes here and there seem like 
one point. The fineness of his distinctions, 
their abundance, and the apparent ease with 
which they are dropped, contribute much to 
our sense of the futility of the world he is 
describing; partly because the world is so 
13 193 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

blind to all this, partly because at first these 
delicate touches seem to create a world all 
surface, a soap-bubble, as it were, in which 
familiar things are refracted into shapes at 
once fantastic and persuasive. Imagine a 
young American, crude, matter-of-fact, and 
rather bored by his crudities and literalness, 
meeting for the first time this spirit. Suppose 
him just enough irritated at and balked by 
the rigid world he knows to be ready to 
attack it, but weaponless. '' Roderick Hud- 
son " falls into his hand. He settles back on 
his lounge before he has read ten lines, with 
the excitement of feeling that he has found 
the needed secret and that it is a long and full 
one. He has read Emerson before, and has 
sneered at the plastic arts. Before he has 
read a week he longs to see the Madonna of 
the Chair, because Henry James has mixed 
it in with his universe by some flitting adjec- 
tive. He longs to see Florence and Rome, 
because Christina and Rowland yawned and 
talked and influenced and came to nothing 
there. His whole thought takes a back- 
ground that he believed foreign to it. There 
is a world that laughs at the limitations and 
rigidity that annoyed him — that is gay, intel- 
lectual, unproselyting; that is, the attractive 
people are all this, and the Philistines are 

194 



HENRY JAMES 

simply funny and unimportant. He knows 
now more clearly what he wants to see and 
be. He wants to see people whose divisions 
of the world are not hampering, and he wants 
to be an ironical and unprejudiced observer. 
His Emerson goes on to the shelf, marked 
abstract and provincial. Instead he buys 
photographs of Italian paintings, studies at- 
lases, plans a trip to Europe, and reads M^ri- 
m6e and Turgenieff. 

For Mr. James is not all the fascinating and 
cultivated satirist. There are forms built of 
the mass of apparently surface touches that are 
adequate expressions of the deepest and most 
lasting experiences. Though the author was 
in each sentence of the book, we realize at the 
end of the thick volume that he was not all 
there. The detail was deliciously redolent of 
a certain point of view ; the whole that gradu- 
ally appears is deeply typical of life, with 
much of its mystery. To quote one of the 
author's stories : " He lived once more into 
his story and was drawn down, as by a siren's 
hand, to where, in the dim under-world of 
fiction, the great, glazed tank of art, strange, 
silent subjects float. He recognized his mo- 
tive and surrendered to his talent." 

Of course there are intelligent readers for 
whom Mr. James's work seems almost frivo- 

195 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

lous. Those who are literal, Inelastic, limited 
to set classifications and distinctions, find him 
remote, unreal, indefinite, inconclusive. They 
say that by nature he is a psychologist or a 
critic, no novelist; that in a kind of expres- 
sion where he would be forced to speak his 
meaning he would be valuable. What they 
call the meaning they want put directly and 
explicitly. A world which is not obviously 
sifted for them, which is all one lump of 
vague reality, the end of which is to create 
with any methods, be they more usually seen 
in the essay, the novel, or any other form, 
the impression corresponding to that the ac- 
tual world makes on us, with its solidity, its 
complexity, its irrationality, — such a piece 
of expression is meaningless to them. And 
to other minds, more vital and less ingenuous, 
it is meaningless too. Though in its most 
general features the world they see is the one 
Mr. James paints, they do not like his details, 
they do not enjoy the flavor of his mind, and 
they therefore cannot go through the many 
pages to get the general plan. The author 
himself believes that his novels were felt by 
Ivan Turgenieff to be hardly food for men. 
The elaboration, the thousand slight touches 
that make the general effect, bore such men. 
The work seems to them embroidery. They 

196 



HENRY JAMES 

want more directness, simplicity, force. Tur- 
genieff has an awful fatalism of his own, but it 
is too simple and too strenuous to come within 
our definition of irony. In the slang of the 
day, Mr. James is too " elegant " to come near 
to the man whom he calls the poet, as he does 
Turgenieff. But to his friends reason dressed 
in banter is more amiable, law is lighter when 
it speaks in the tones of irresponsibiHty. One 
who sees his matter as clearly as his manner 
can hardly fail to feel that he is distinguished 
by range as surely as by precision, by endur- 
ance as surely as by acuteness ; that his in- 
sight is as extensive as it is fine, and his art is 
equal to its expression. This is not to deny 
that the variety of persons, scenes, or situa- 
tions which he handles is rather slight. It is 
to assert, however, that with the illustrations 
he does use he sets forth adequately, com- 
pletely, some essential springs of the mind. 
Though his people and his scenes have not 
the profusion of contrast that life has, that 
some artists have, the relations are there in 
their proper proportions, only in a shorter 
scale. 

A limitation in means similar to this lack 
of exuberance is an inabihty to paint vividly 
the physical world. One understands — feels 
— the surroundings, but he hardly sees them. 

197 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

The most striking of his descriptions have 
something the air of feats. It is difficult to 
illustrate a negative, but here is a sentence in 
which the picturesque is tried for : — 

" There is a certain evening that I count as virtu- 
ally a first impression — the end of a wet, black 
Sunday, twenty years ago, about the first of March. 
There had been an earlier vision, but it had turned 
gray, like faded ink, and the occasion I speak of 
was a fresh beginning," 

Perhaps the following description of the first 
appearance of Christina Light will show how 
he just misses the visual : — 

" A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes, a mass 
of dusky hair over a low forehead, a blooming oval 
of perfect purity, a flexible lip just touched with 
disdain, the step and carriage of a tired princess, — 
these were the general features of his vision." 

The clothing of the personages and their 
physique seem described with effort, and so 
do the landscape, the room, or whatever the 
setting may be. The author is not to a large 
degree a man for whom the visible world 
exists, in the sense of Gautier's famous 
phrase. Its interest is adjective mostly: the 
interest of its effect on persons first, and, 
second, an interest of suggestion. It is rich 

198 



HENRY JAMES 

in analogy. Mr. James feels its importance, 
and he usually gives its effect adequately, but 
sometimes one feels that his work is weakened 
by rather more than is necessary of direct 
description of the environment; one is disap- 
pointed at the unconvincing touch. For, to 
the reader who is best fitted to appreciate 
Mr. James, this literal setting is not neces- 
sary. The atmosphere is created without it ; 
it comes from what the personages do and say, 
and from the author's manner of talking about 
them. The environment is a great bully with 
some of the best literary workmen of recent 
times. It is a very important element of art, 
but it doesn't need to be labelled. In the 
main Mr. James is free from this exaggera- 
tion. He has a rare, distinguished genius, 
and it is the genius of an artist, but the artist 
is a psychologist. The idea is what gives hfe 
to his work; the personal, the abstract idea; 
though this idea does not exist apart from its 
embodiment, and is described, necessarily, 
when it is most adequately described, in 
terms of its external expression, — it is the 
side of final interest. " A psychological rea- 
son is, to my imagination, an object adorably 
pictorial," says Mr. James ; and the reverse 
is as true: when a pictorial object interests 
him, his interest is delightfully psychological. 

199 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

One who feels this inseparability of form and 
idea in Mr. James is rather supported by the 
discovery that his father was a logician at once 
acute and picturesque, and that his brother is 
a studied psychologist who connects the ordi- 
nary matter of his science with the mixed 
stream of life with uncommon subtlety and 
with uncommon definiteness, seeming at once 
psychologist and logician, scientist and poet. 
One is pleased also to read that at the age of 
seven Mr. Henry James lay on the hearth rug 
and studied " Punch," and that he longed 
to know the life suggested by the pictures. 
There is nothing told us of the child's love 
for the lines and colors of nature. It is 
beauty that is a human expression that 
interests him ; that is information about 
human character. There is no truancy in 
the mind. It sticks to the fact from the 
beginning. There are no fables and fairy 
stories for it, no fancy, no forms that are 
not fact ; and, on the other hand, the young 
psychologist is an artist, and all his facts have 
form. Later he has said that he can imag- 
ine no object in weaving together imaginary 
events except the representation of life. The 
child's mind was as loyal to the same object. 
To explain what is meant by saying that, 
while everything is expression, everything is 

200 



HENRY JAMES 

also form to Mr. James, may, after one has 
denied him any remarkable eye for line and 
color, be rather difficult. Of the truth of 
the proposition, however, there can be little 
doubt. He says somewhere that the most 
definite thing about an emotion is its surface. 
The metaphor is at once baffling and convinc- 
ing, as his metaphors are likely to be. The 
thing I wish to emphasize is that it is his 
perception of the shapes of the moral world 
that gives him his distinguished value. In 
this bit, for instance, there is a fair visual 
image, slight, however, compared to the 
picturesqueness one feels. 

*' I always left him in a state of ' intimate ' excite- 
ment, with a feeling that all sorts of valuable things 
had been suggested to me ; the condition in which 
a man swings his cane as he walks, leaps lightly 
over gutters, and then stops, for no reason at all, 
to look, with an air of being struck, into a shop- 
window where he sees nothing." 

These powers and these limitations some- 
times lead one to wonder why Mr. James is 
not more a critic and less a novelist. As a 
matter of fact, most of his power is in his 
fiction, and the greater part in his long 
novels. He needs time for a multitude of 
his light touches to give to his picture 

201 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

a convincing simplicity. The best short 
stories, plays, and essays have been made in 
bolder, shorter strokes. In the drama, he 
not only misses the living touch, but loses 
his own charm. His dialogue in becoming 
shorter becomes stiff, instead of becoming 
intense. Directness and simplicity of feel- 
ing are outside of Mr. James's power of 
representation. There is a scene in " The 
Tragic Muse " in which Julia takes Nick's 
head in her hands and kisses it. It makes 
the reader close his teeth, as at a false note. 
He feels that the airy world, so parallel to 
the real world, so representative of it, is 
shattered when such material is forced into 
it. The comedy of his universe is "the 
smile of the soul," as Beyle said of French 
wit, and his tragedy is the sigh of the soul. 
The laugh and the throb are not in his scale ; 
and the smile of the body and the sigh of 
the body are not there, either. His art, a 
firm and rounded representation of life, is 
no direct presentation of it, no copy. His 
dialogue may improve in plausibility and 
flexibility, but not so much that one cannot 
feel that he is describing a world that his 
imagination never saw; that he has seen 
the astral bodies of people and seen them 
static, in certain relations, to be described 

202 



HENRY JAMES 

by him in long paragraphs of his own deli- 
cate observations, saying comparatively little 
themselves — speaking only for confirmation, 
as it were ; that this fairy world of his, con- 
taining in it the essence of the interest of 
life for many, will not for any be visible to 
the outer eye, with fleshly bodies and tangi- 
ble clothes, furniture, relations of actual 
space. 

In criticism he is less successful than in 
fiction, for reasons other than this inability 
to give the direct blow. He repeats, some- 
times grossly. A number of times he says 
without variation that, however flat his joke, 
du Maurier's picture has its unfailing charm ; 
even the language scarcely changes. It may 
be that part of this iteration is due to sym- 
pathy, to the desire to make the length of 
his comment equal his interest, a desire 
which, when his attitude toward his subject 
is very simple, is disastrous. Much could 
be learned ' by comparing this essay with 
Merimee's criticism of his friends, where 
the critic is as brief as he is when he carves 
his stories. Mr. James has no power of 
sacrifice. Effort, effort, always effort, he 
says, is the secret of success for all ambi- 
tious workers in the field of art. It is a 
secret that sometimes leads him astray, for 

203 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

he neglects other conflicting secrets ; he fails 
to rest and he fails to throw away duplicates. 
"You cannot," he says to the young writer, 
"take too many notes." Without quibbling 
over the metaphor, one may believe it possi- 
ble to take notes too constantly and with too 
much strain, and certainly possible to use 
too many of one's notes. 

Another quality, which is one of the 
merits of the stories, — delicacy, — becomes 
aggressive and turns into a defect, squeam- 
ishness, in some of the essays. " Be gener- 
ous and delicate," Mr. James says to the 
young writer, "and then, in the vulgar 
phrase, go in ! " That parenthetical apology 
for colloquialism occurs rather too often. It 
begins to savor of literalness. We should 
like to have rather more taken for granted. 
We feel too insistent an air of distance, of fine 
breeding, even of condescension. We like 
to see one artist strictly bounded by the 
delicacy of his tastes; but we wish the critic 
to know that it may be another artist's 
strength to be crude or naked. The instinct 
of privacy, for instance, is something upon 
which Mr. James's taste absolutely insists. 
He cannot talk long enough or severely 
enough about the publication by M. Edmond 
de Goncourt of an account of his brother's 

204 



HENRY JAMES 

mental wreck, and of the nervous disease of 
both of them, or of the publication of Flau- 
bert's letters, and he interjects his respect 
for privacy on all occasions. It is safe to 
say he does not feel imaginatively Balzac's 
racy and unquotable illustration of his ideal 
of openness. This queasiness might be 
parodied by the story of a man who could 
not believe that athletes are sincerely with- 
out any feeling of shame when they run, bare 
to the knee, through the city streets. The 
critic must not insist too solemnly on his 
view of etiquette, if the world is to listen to 
him. 

The one fault of the essays still to be men- 
tioned is comparatively trifling, and, like the 
others, akin to a virtue, to the originality of 
Mr. James's choice of words, — a virtue par- 
ticularly apt in a writer whose end is exact 
and fine discrimination ; for in words, as in ob- 
jects, familiarity dulls our vision, and of two 
words expressing a shade with equal accuracy y 

the rarer is the one that Mr. James always 
chooses. It is one of his methods of sharpen- 
ing his reader's mind and keeping fresh his 
attention. His fault is that he narrows his 
vocabulary by overworking his fresh and apt 
words. He not only sacrifices variety of 
phrase ; he sometimes lets a word try for an 

205 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

idea that a more familiar term would hit more 
precisely. What essay can you read through 
without finding ** mitigated," " casual," " in- 
veterate," and other adjectives that have driven 
all rivals from the field and gained themselves 
a factotum air? They are delicious at first, 
and finally fiat. 

Perhaps, after all, however, this last word 
is unfair. It may be that the weaknesses of 
this inclusive, subtle, contemporary spirit are 
rooted in its strength. If so, it would be 
silly to object. It may be that what looks 
like queasiness of taste to an outsider is a part 
of the elegance, and that what looks like flip- 
pancy is only the more radical manifestation of 
the subtlety. It is, of course, only apprecia- 
tion that we seek, and if in the world of a 
writer whom we are studying certain details 
which do not please us are an organic part of 
that world there is no more to be said. In 
this case, fortunately, it is of small importance 
whether these particular characteristics be 
spots on a bright art or features of it, for 
they are so slight that they are scarcely 
visible in a general view of the work that 
Mr. James has done, — a work of equal value 
to the detached student of life and to the 
sympathizer with special human progress. 
Standing alike in the world of art and in the 

206 



HENRY JAMES 

world of sympathy, he has been the interpreter 
of each to the other with equal fairness if not 
with equal love. The breadth of the impres- 
sion of life that can be got from his books is 
due to this broad stand, covering two points 
of view as far apart as any : the standpoint of 
the man to whom life is a thing to be lived, 
with emotion and prejudice, and the stand- 
point of the man to whom it is a lot of lines 
and shades that can be combined into attrac- 
tive and representative surfaces. The literal 
attitude is to Mr. James apparently the more 
pathetic, and the artistic or symbolic one the 
more distinguished. He himself is intimate 
with both, and in his novels the two natures, 
each in many grades, are kept face to face, 
and each is shown as it seems to itself and as 
it seems to the other. Therefore to us Anglo- 
Saxons he has been an education that we 
needed, for the artistic attitude (in the present 
sense of the unmoral, form-loving attitude) is 
particularly hard for us to see. Closely allied 
to this conflict is the contrast between culture 
and primitiveness which he has painted so 
carefully and so often in his groups of Ameri- 
cans and Europeans. To these two great 
pictorial ideas Mr. James has given his best 
work, and in doing the best he could for art 
has done what was most fit and timely for 
207 



LITERARY STATESMEN 

the needs of some of his countrymen. Giving 
to them their own eloquence and coherence, 
he helps them see with some comprehension 
the people to whom they are fantastic. They 
know whom he likes to be with, but they 
trust his impartiality none the less, for they 
feel that he does not like too strongly to be 
with any one. His artistic friends, his culti- 
vated friends, he sees in their limits too, al- 
though not so clearly as he sees his Daisy 
Millers and his Millicent Hennings. If he 
patronizes Emerson and lauds Mrs. Hum- 
phry Ward we can forgive him, as we can if 
his essay on London has more infatuation 
than power. We forgive him because he has 
written " The Tragic Muse," "■ The Princess 
Cassimassima," and " The American ; " be- 
cause, although in his essays he has told what 
his limitations of sympathy are, he has in his 
novels spoken more impersonally. Whether 
his novels can live, whether the world will take 
him thinned and spread out into so many 
volumes, may well be doubted, for he does 
not justify himself page by page and word by 
word ; and one seldom rereads him. But he 
has been a marked man of his time and has 
done a good work in it. 
1894. 



208 



PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U. S. A. 
FOR HERBERTS. STONE & CO., PUB- 
LISHERS, CHICAGO, AND NEW YORK 



THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
HERBERT S. STONE 
& CO. THE CHAP-BOOK 
The HOUSE BEAUTIFUL 




CAXTON BUILDING, CHICAGO 

III FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 

1897 



CAXTON BUILDING, CHICAGO 
III FIFTH AVE., NEW YORK 

THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
HERBERT S. STONE 
& CO. THE CHAP-BOOK 
The HOUSE BEAUTIFUL 



Ade, George. 

Artie : A Story of the Streets and of the 
Town. TVith many pictures by John T. 

McCuTCHEON. l6?no. $l.2S' 

Ninth thousand. 

" Mr. Ade shows all the qualities of a successful 
novelist." — Chicago Tribune. 

" Artie is a character, and George Ade has 
limned him deftly as well as amusingly. Under 
his rollicking abandon and recklessness we are 
made to feel the real sense and sensitiveness, and 
the worldly wisdom of a youth whose only lan- 
guage is that of a street-gamin. As a study of the 
peculiar type chosen, it is both typical and inimi- 
table." — Detroit Free Press. 

"It is brim full of fun and picturesque slang. 
Nobody will be any the worse for reading about 
Artie, if he does talk slang. He 's a good fellow 
at heart, and Mamie Carroll is the * making of 
him.' He talks good sense and good morality, and 
these things have n't yet gone out of style, even in 
Chicago." — New Tork Recorder. 



"Well-meaning admirers have compared Artie 
to Chimmie Fadden, but Mr. Townsend's creation, 
excellent as it is, cannot be said to be entirely free 
from exaggeration. The hand of Chimmie Fad- 
den's maker is to be discerned at times. And just 
here Artie is particularly strong — he is always 
Artie, and Mr. Ade is always concealed, and never 
obtrudes his personality." — Chicago Post. 

'* George Ade is a writer, the direct antithesis of 
Stephen Crane. In 'Artie ' he has given the world 
a story of the streets at once wholesome, free, and 
stimulating. The world is filled with people like 
•Artie ' Blanchard and his ' girl,' ' Mamie ' Carroll, 
and the story of their lives, their hopes, and 
dreams, and loves, is immeasurably more whole- 
some than all the stories like 'George's Mother' 
that could be written by an army of the writers 
who call themselves realists." — Editorial, Albany 
Evening Journal. 

Ade, George. 

Pink Marsh : A Story of the Streets and 
of the Town. With forty full-page pic- 
tures by John T. McCutcheon. i6mo. 
Uniform zuith Artie. ^1.25. 

Fourth thousand. 

"There is, underlying these character sketches, 
a refinement of feeling that wins and retains one's 
admiration." — St. Louis Globe- Democrat. 

"Here is a perfect triumph of characterization. 
* * * Pink must become a household word." — 
Kansas City Star. 

"These sprightly sketches do for the Northern 
town negro what Mr. Joel Chandler Harris's 



« Uncle Remus Papers' have done for the South- 
ern old plantation slave," — The Independent. 

" It is some time since we have met with a more 
amusing character than is * Pink Marsh,' or to 
give him his full title, William Pinckney Marsh, of 
Chicago. * * * ' Pink' is not the conventional 
'coon 'of the comic paper and the variety hall, 
but a genuine flesh and blood type, presented 
with a good deal of literary and artistic skill." — 
New Vork Sun. 

"The man who can bring a new type into the 
literature of the day is very near a genius, if he 
does nothing else. For that reason Mr. George 
Ade, the chronicler of 'Artie,' the street boy of 
Chicago, did a rather remarkable thing when he 
put that young man into a book. Now Mr. Ade 
has given us a new character, and to me a much 
more interesting one, because I do not remember 
having met him face to face in literature be- 
fore. — Cincinnati Commercial Tribune. 

Benham, Charles. 

The Fourth Napoleon: A Romance. 
i2mo. $\.^o. 

An accurate account of the history of the Fourth 
Napoleon, the coup d'etat which places him on 
the throne of France, the war with Germany, and 
his love intrigues as emperor. A vivid picture of 
contemporary^ politics in Paris. 

Bickford, L. H. 

(and Richard Stillman Powell.) 
Phyllis in Bohemia. With pictures 
and decorations by Orson Lowell, and 



a cover designed by Frank Hazenplug. 
l6mo. $i.^S' 

Sentimental comedy of the lightest kind. It is 
the story of Phyllis leaving Arcadia to find Bohe- 
mia, and of her adventures there. Gentle satire 
of the modern literary and artistic youth and a 
charming love story running through all. 



Blossom, Henry M., Jr. 

Checkers: A Hard -Luck Story. By 
the author of " The Documents in Evi- 
dence.''^ l6mo. $1.1'^. Tenth thousand, 

"Abounds in the most racy and picturesque 
slang." — Nezv Tork Recorder. 

" ' Checkers' is an interesting and entertaining 
chap, a distinct type, with a separate tongue and a 
way of saying things that is oddly humorous." — 
Chicago Record. 

"If I had to ride from New York to Chicago on 
a slow train, I should like a half dozen books as 
gladsome as 'Checkers,' and I could laugh at the 
trip." — Nevj Tork Comtnercial Advertiser. 

"* Checkers' himself is as distinct a creation as 
Chimmie Fadden, and his racy slang expresses a 
livelier wit. The racing part is clever reporting,, 
and as horsey and 'up to date' as any one could 
ask. The slang of the racecourse is caught with 
skill and is vivid and picturesque, and students of 
the byways of language may find some new gems 
of colloquial speech to add to their lexicons." — 
Springfield Republican. 



Bloundelle-Burton, John. 

Across the Salt Seas : A Romance of 
the JVar of Succession. By the author of 
^-^ In the Day of Adversity ^^ ^^The Hi span- 
tola Plate ^'^ " A Gentleman Adventurer y* 
etc, i2mo. ;^i.50. 

In "The Hispaniola Plate" Mr. Burton showed 
his familiarity with the stories of the buccaneers 
of the Spanish Main. In this new story there is 
still this picturesque element, although the scene 
is the battle of Vigo and the looting of the Spanish 
galleons. The hero escapes through Spain in an 
attempt to reach Marlborough in Flanders, and 
has manj'^ exciting though not improbable adven- 
tures. Any one who cares for good fighting, and 
in whose ears the "sack of Maracaibo" and the 
"fall of Panama" have an alluring sovind, will 
like the book. There is also an attractive love 
story in a rather unusual form. 

Chap-Book Essays. 

A Volume of Reprints from the 
Chap - Book. Contributions by T. W. 
HiGGiNsoN, H. W. Mabie, Louise 
Chandler Moulton, H. H. Boye- 
sen, Edmund Gosse, John Burroughs, 
Norman Hapgood, Mrs. Reginald 
DE KovEN, Louise Imogen Guiney, 
Lewis E. Gates, Alice Morse Earle, 
Laurence Jerrold, Richard Henry 
Stoddard, Eve Blantyre Simpson, 

6 



and Maurice Thompson, w'lth a cover 
designed by A. E. Borie. i6mo. $1.25. 

Chap-Book Stories. 

A Volume of Reprints from the 

Chap-Book. Contributions by Octave 

Thanet, Grace Ellery Channing, 

Maria Louise Pool, and Others. i6mo. 

;^ 1 . 2 5 . Second edition . 

The authors of this volume are all American 
Besides the well-known names, there are some 
which were seen in the Chap-Book for the first 
time. The volume is bound in an entirely new 
and startling fashion. 

Chatiield-Taylor, H. C. 

The Land of the Castanet: Span- 
ish Sketches^ with tzventy-five full-page 
illustrations. i2mo. ^1.25. 

"Gives the reader an insight into the life of 
Spain at the present time which he cannot get 
elsewhere." — Cincinnati Comtnercial Tribune. 

*' Mr. Chatfield-Tajlor's word-painting of special 
events — the bull-fight for instance — is vivid and 
well colored. He gets at the national character 
very well indeed, and we feel that we know our 
Spain better by reason of his handsome little 
book." — Boston Traveler. 

"He writes pleasantly and impartially, and very 
fairly sums up the Spanish character. * * * Mr. 
Taylor's book is well illustrated, and is more read- 
able than the reminiscences of the average globe- 
trotter." — Nexv 2'or/i Sun. 



Chatfield-Taylor, H. C. 

The Vice of Fools: yl Novel of Society 
Life in IVashington. By the author or 
" The Land of the Castanet^'' " Two 
Women and a Fool^' " An American 
Peeress ^^ etc. With ten full page pictures 
by Raymond M. Crosby. i6mo. ^1.50. 

The great success of Mr. Chatfield-Taylor's so- 
ciety novels gives assurance of a large sale to this 
new story. It can hardly be denied that few per- 
sons in this country are better qualified to treat 
the "smart set" in various American cities, and 
the life in diplomatic circles offers an unusually 
picturesque opportunity. 

D'Annunzio, Gabrlele. 

Episcopo and Company. Translated 
by Myrta Leonora fones. i6mo. ^1.25. 

Third edition, 

Gabriele d'Annunzio is the best known and 
most gifted of modern Italian novelists. His work 
is making a great sensation at present in all lite- 
rary circles. The translation now offered gave 
the first opportunity English-speaking readers 
had to know him in their own language. 

De Fontenoy, The Marquise. 

Eve's Glossary. By the author of'-'-^ueer 
Sprigs of Gentility^'* with decorations in 
two colors by Frank Hazenplug. po, 

8 



An amusing volume of gossip and advice for 
gentlewomen. It treats of health, costume, and 
entertainments; exemplifies by reference to noted 
beauties of England and the Continent; and is 
embellished with decorative borders of great 
charm. 



Earle, Alice Morse. 

Curious Punishments of Bygone 
Days, with twelve quaint pictures and a 
cover design hy Frank Hazenplug. 
i2mo. ;^i.50. 

"In this dainty little volume Alice Morse Earle 
has done a real service, not only to present read- 
ers, but to future students of bygone customs. To 
come upon all the information that is here put 
into readable shape, one would be obliged tosearch 
through many ancient and cumbrous records." — 
Boston Transcript . 

"Mrs. Alice Morse Earle has made a diverting 
and edifying book in her * Curious Punishments 
of Bygone Days,' which is published in a style of 
quaintness befitting the theme." — New Tork 
Tribune. 

"This light and entertaining volume is the most 
recent of Mrs.Earle's popular antiquarian sketches, 
and will not fail to amuse and mildly instruct 
readers who love to recall the grim furnishings and 
habits of previous centuries, without too much 
serious consideration of the root from which they 
sprang, the circumstances in which they flour- 
ished, or the uses they served." — The Independent. 



Embree, Charles Fleming. 

For the Love of Tonita, and Other 
Tales of the Mesas. With a cover 
designed by Fernand Lungren. i6mo, 

$l.2S' 

Characteristic and breezy stories of the South- 
west, by a new author. Full of romantic interest 
and with an unusually humorous turn. The book 
coming from a new v/riter, is likelj' to be a real 
surprise. The cover is an entirely neAv experi- 
ment in bookbinding. 

Fletcher, Horace. 

Happiness as found in Forethought 

MINUS FeARTHOUGHT, AND OTHER 

Suggestions in Menticulture. i2mo. 

;^i.oo. 

The enormous popularity of Mr. Fletcher's 
simple philosophy, as shown in the sale of his 
first volume, "Menticulture" is a sufficient evi- 
dence of the prospects of the new book. In it he 
develops further the ideas of menticulture, and 
urges with energy and directness his plea for the 
avoidance of worry. 

Fletcher, Horace. 

Menticulture : or the A-B-C of True 
Living. l2mo. ;^i.oo. 

Nineteenth thousands 

Transferred by the author to the present publishers. 
lO 



Gordon, Julien 

Eat Not Thy Heart: A NoveL By 
the author of'''' A Diploma fs Diary ^'^ etc. 
i6mo^ $\.^'>,. 

Life on Long Island at a luxurious country 
place, is the setting for this storj, and Mrs. 
Cruger's dialogue is as crisp, as witty, as satirical 
of the foibles of fashionable life as ever. She has 
tried a new experiment, however, in making a 
study of a humbler type, the farmer's wife, and 
her ineffectual jealousy of the rich city people. 

Hapgood, Norman. 

Literary Statesmen and Others. 
A hook of essays on men seen from a distance. 
i2mo. 1^1.50. 

Essays from one of our younger writers, who is 
already well known as a man of promise, and who 
has been given the unusual distinction of starting 
his career by unqualified acceptance from the En- 
glish reviews. Scholarly, incisive, and thought- 
ful essays which will be a valuable contribution to 
contemporary criticism. 



Hichens, Robert. 

Flames : A Novel. By the author of-'- A 
Green Carnation^'* " An Imaginative 
Man^^ " The Folly of Eustace^'' etc. .^ with 
a cover design by F. R. Kimbrough. 
1 2 mo. ;^ 1 . 5 o . Second edition, 

II 



"The book is sure to be widely read." — Buffalo 
Commercial. 

'• It carries on the attention of the reader from 
the first chapter to the last. Full of exciting in- 
cidents, very modern, excessively up to date." — 
London Daily Telegraph. 

" In his last book Mr. Hichens has entirely 
proved himself. His talent does not so much lie 
in the conventional novel, but more in his strange 
and fantastic medium. ' Flames ' suits him, has 
him at his best." — Pall Mall Gazette. 

'" Flames,* " says the Londo7i Chronicle, in a long 
editorial on the story, " is a cunning blend of the 
romantic and the real, the work of a man who can 
observe, who can think, who can imagine, and who 
can write." 

"'Flames' is a powerful story, not only for the 
novelty of its plot, but for the skill with which it 
is worked out, the brilliancy of its descriptions of 
the London streets, of the seamy side of the city's 
life which night turns to the beholder; but the 
descriptions are neither erotic nor morbid. * * * 
We may repudiate the central idea of soul-trans- 
ference, but the theory is made the vehicle of 
this striking tale in a manner that is entirely sane 
and wholesome. It leaves no bad taste in the 
mouth. * * * 'Flames' — it is the author's 
fancy that the soul is like a little flame, and hence 
the title — must be read with care. There is much 
brilliant epigrammatic writing in it that will 
delight the literary palate. It is far and away 
ahead of anything that Mr. Hichens has ever writ- 
ten before." — Brooklyn Ragle. 

James, Henry. 

What Maisie Knew : A novel. i2mo. 

$i.SO. 

12 



The publication of a new novel — one quite un- 
like his previous work — by Mr. Henry James, 
cannot fail to be an event of considerable literary 
importance. During its appearance in the Chap- 
Book^ the story has been a delight to many read- 
ers. As the first study of child-life which Mr. 
James has ever attempted, it is worth the attention 
of all persons interested in English and American 
letters. 

Kinross, Albert. 

The Fearsome Island ; Being a mod- 
ern rendering of the narrative of one 
Silas Fordred^ Master Mariner of Hythe^ 
whose shipwreck and subsequent adventures 
are herein set forth. Also an appendix^ 
accounting.^ in a rational manner .^ for the 
seeming marvels that Silas Fordred en- 
countered during his sojourn on the fearsome 
island of Don Diego Rodriguez. IVith a 
cover designed by Frank Hazenplug. 
l6mo. ^1.25. 

Le Gallienne, Richard. 

Prose Fancies : Second series. By the 
author of '•^ The Book-Bills of Narcissus .^^^ 
^^The ^uest of the Golden Girl^" etc. 
With a cover designed by Frank Hazen- 
plug. i6mo. $\.2^. Second edition. 

" In these days of Beardsley pictures and deca- 
dent novels, it is good to find a book as sweet, as 

13 



pure, as delicate as Mr. Le Gallienne's." — New 
Orleans Picayune. 

"'Prose Fancies' ought to be in every one's 
summer library, for it is just the kind of a book 
one loves to take to some secluded spot to read 
and dream over." — Kansas City Times. 

" There are witty bits of sayings by the score, 
and sometimes whole paragraphs of nothing but 
wit. Somewhere there is a little skit about * Scot- 
land, the country that takes its name from the 
whisky made there'; and the transposed proverbs, 
like ' It is an ill wind for the shorn lamb/ and 
' Many rise on the stepping-stones of their dead 
relations,' are brilliant. 'Most of us would never 
be heard of were it not for our enemies,' is a cap- 
ital epigram." — Chicago Times-Herald. 

" Mr. Le Gallienne is first of all a poet, and these 
little essays, which savor somewhat of Lamb, of 
Montaigne, of Lang, and of Birrell, are larded 
with verse of exquisite grace. He rarely ventures 
into the grotesque, but his fancy follows fair 
paths; a Certain quaintness of expression and the 
idyllic atmosphere of the book charm one at the 
beginning and carry one through the nineteen 
'fancies' that comprise the volume." — Chicago 
Record. 

Magruder, Julia. 

Miss Ayr of Virginia, and Other 
Stories. By the author of ^'' The Princess 
Soma;' " The Violet^' etc. With a 
cover-design hyY . R. Kimbrough. i6mo. 

$1.2$. 

"By means of original incident and keen por- 
traiture, ' Miss Ayr of Virginia, and Other Stories,' 

H 



is made a decidedly readable collection. In the 
initial tale the character of the young Southern 
girl is especially well drawn; Miss Magruder's 
most artistic work, however, is found at the end 
of the volume, under the title ' Once More.' " — The 
Outlook. 

"The contents of 'Miss Kyx of Virginia' are not 
less fascinating than the cover. * * * These 
tales * * * are a delightful diversion for a 
spare hour. They are dream^y without being can- 
didly realistic, and are absolutely refreshing in 
the simplicity of the author's style." — Boston 
Herald. 

"Julia Magruder's stories are so good that one 
feels like reading passages here and there again 
and again. In the collection, ' Miss Ajt of Vir- 
ginia, and other stories,' she is at her best, and 
'Miss Kyx of Virginia,' has all the daintiness, the 
point and pith and charm which the author so 
well commands. The portraiture of a sweet, un- 
sophisticated, pretty, smart Southern girl is be- 
witching." — Minneapolis Times. ^ 

Malet, Lucas. 

The Carissima : A modern grotesque. 
By the author of " The Wages of Sin^'' 
etc. i2mo. ;^i.50. Second edition. 

*^*This is the first novel which Lucas Malet 
has written since "The Wages of Sin." 

"The strongest piece of fiction written during 
the year, barring only the masters, Meredith and 
Thomas Hardy." — Kansas City Star. 

"There are no dull pages in 'The Carissima,' no 
perfunctory people. Every character that goes in 
and out on the mimic stage is fully rounded, and 
the central one provokes curiosity, like those of 

15 



that Sphinx among novelists, Mr. Henry James. 
Lucas Malet has caught the very trick of James's 
manner, and the likeness presses more than 
once." — Milwaukee Sentinel. 

"The interest throughout the story is intense 
and perfectly sustained. The character-drawing 
is as good as it can be. The Carissima, her father, 
and a journalistic admirer are, in particular, abso- 
lute triumphs. The book is wonderfully witty, 
and has touches of genuine pathos, more than two 
and more than three. It is much better than any- 
thing else we have seen froin the same hand." — 
Pall Mall Gazette. 

"Lucas Malet has insight, strength, the gift of 
satire, and a captivating brilliance of touch; in 
short, a literary equipment such as not too many 
present-day novelists are possessed of." — London 
Daily Mail. 

" We cannot think of readers as skipping a line 
or failing to admire the workmanship, or to be 
deeply interested, both in the characters and the 
plot. ' Carissima ' is likely to add to the reputa- 
tion of the author of ' The Wages of Sin.'" — Glas- 
go-w Herald. 

Merrick, Leonard. 

One Man's View. By the author of 
"^ Daughter of the Philistines^'' etc. 
i6rno. ;^i.oo. 

The story of an ambitious American girl and 
her attempts to get on the English stage, her mar- 
riage and subsequent troubles, and the final hap- 
piness of every one. The author's point of view 
and the story itself are unusual and interesting. 

" Very well told."— r//^ Outlook. 
i6 



"Clever and original." — Charleston News and 
Coiiricr. 

"Eminently readable." — Ncxv Orleans Times- 
Democrat. 

" A highly emotional, sensational story of much 
literary merit." — Chicago Inter Ocean, 

"A novel over which we could fancy ourselves 
sitting up till the small hours." — London Daily 
Chronicle. 

" A really remarkable piece of fiction * * * 
a saving defense against dullness that may come 
in vacation times." — Kansas City Star. 

Moore, F. Frankfort. 

The Impudent Comedian and 
Others. Illustrated. i2mo. $1.50. 

" Several of the stories have appeared in the 
Chap-Book\ others are now published for the first 
time. They all relate to seventeenth and eigh- 
teenth century characters — Nell Gwynn, Kitty 
Clive, Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, and David 
Garrick. They are bright, witty, and dramatic. 

"Capital short stories." — Brooklyji Eagle. 

" A thing of joy." — Buffcdo Express. 

"The person who has a proper eye to the artis- 
tic in fiction will possess them ere another day shall 
dawn." — Scravton Tribune. 

"Full of the mannerisms of the stage and thor- 
oughly Bohemian in atmosphere." — Boston Herald. 

"The celebrated actresses whom he takes for 
his heroines sparkle with feminine liveliness of 
mind." — JVerv York Tribune. 

" A collection of short stories which has a flash 
of the picturesqueness, the repartee, the dazzle of 

17 



"Never, certainly, a book with such a scene on 
which so much artistic care has been lavished. 
* * The reader has no choice but to be con- 
vinced." — Reviezv of Reviews. 

"Mr. Arthur Morrison has already distinguished 
himself (in his Tales of Mean Streets) as a deline- 
ator of the lives of the East -end poor, but his 
present book takes a deeper hold on us." — London 
Titnes. 

"Is indeed indisputably one of the most inter- 
esting novels this year has produced. * * One 
of those rare and satisfactory novels in which 
almost every sentence has its share in the entire 
design." — Saturday Revievj. 

" Since Daniel Defoe, no such consummate 
master of realistic fiction has arisen among us as 
Mr. Arthur Morrison. Hardly any praise could 
be too much for the imaginative power and artis- 
tic perfection and beauty of this picture of the de- 
praved and loathsome phases of human life. 
There is all of Defoe's fidelity of realistic detail, 
suffused with the light and warmth of a genius 
higher and purer than Defoe's." — Scotsman. 

"It more than fulfills the pron}ise of 'Tales of 
Mean Streets ' — it makes you confident that Mr. 
Morrison has yet better work to do. The power 
displayed is magnificent, and the episode of the 
murder of Weech, ' fence ' and ' nark,' and of the 
capture and trial of his murderer, is one that 
stamps itself upon the memory as a thing done 
once and for all. Perrott in the dock, or as he 
awaits the executioner, is a fit companion of Fagin 
condemned. The book cannot but confirm the 
admirers of Mr. Morrison's remarkable talent in 
the opinions they formed on reading ' Tales of 
Mean Streets.' ''—Black and White. 

20 



Powell, Richard Stillman. 
(See Bickford, L. H.) 

Pritchard, Martin J. 

Without Sin: A novel. i2mo. ;^i.50. 

Third edition. 

*^*The New York Journal gave a half-page 
review of the book and proclaimed it •' the most 
startling novel jet." 

" Abounds in situations of thrilling interest. A 
unique and daring book." — Review of Rcvievjs 
(London). 

"One is hardly likely to go far wrong in pre- 
dicting that ' Without Sin' will attract abundant 
notice. Too much can scarcely be said in praise 
of Mr. Pritchard's treatment of his subject." — 
Acadetny. 

"The very ingenious way in which improbable 
incidents are made to appear natural, the ingenious 
manner in which the story is sustained to the end, 
the undoubted fascination of the writing and the 
convincing charm of the principal characters, are 
just what make this novel so deeply dangerous 
while so intensely interesting." — The World 
(London). 

Pool, Maria Louise. 

In Buncombe County. i6mo. $\.i'^. 

Second edition. 

** • In Buncombe County ' is bubbling over with 
merriment — one could not be blue with such a 
companion for an hour." — Boston Times. 

21 



" Maria Louise Pool is a joy forever, principally 
because she so nobly disproves the lurking theory 
that women are born destitute of humor. Hers is 
not acquired; it is the real thing. ' In Buncombe 
County ' is perfect with its quiet appreciation of 
the humorous side of the everyday affairs of life." 
— Chicago Daily News. 

"It is brimming over with humor, and the 
reader who can follow the fortunes of the redbird 
alone, who flutters through the first few chapters, 
and not be moved to long laughter, must be sadly 
insensitive. But laugh as he may, he will always 
revert to the graver vein which unobtrusively 
runs from the first to the last page in the book. 
He will lay down the narrative of almost gro- 
tesque adventure with a keen remembrance of its 
tenderness and pathos." — Nevj Tork Tribune. 

Raimond, C. E. 

The Fatal Gift of Beauty, and 
Other Stories. By the Author of 
'' George Mandeville' s Husband^'' etc, 
i6mo. ^1.25. 

A book of stories which will not quickly be sur- 
passed for real humor, skillful characterization 
and splendid entertainment. "The Confessions 
of a Cruel Mistress " is a masterpiece, and the 
*' Portman Memoirs" exceptionally clever. 

Rossetti, Christina. 

Maude : Prose and Verse. With a pref- 
ace by William Michael Rossetti, l6mo. 

;$i.oo. 

22 



THE CHAP-BOOK 

A Semi -Monthly Miscellany and Review of Belles -Lettres. Price, lo 
cents a copy; $2.00 a year. 

"The Chap-Book is indispensable. In its new form, as a literary re- 
view, it fills an important place in our magazine literature." — Rochester 
Post - Exp r ess. 

" The new Chap-Book is an imposing and inspiriting production to take 
in the hands, and it is o{)ened with an anticipatory zest that is rewarded 
simply by a reading of the contents." — Providence News. 

" The notes are vivacious and vigorous. The literary quality is what 
one has a right to expect from a literary journal, and we heartily welcome 
the new Chap-Book to our table." — The Watchman. 

" In its enlarged form the magazine has taken on a somewhat more 
serious aspect than it carried in its first estate, but it has lost none of its 
crispness and interest." — Brooklyn Eagle. 

"As we glance through the Chap-Book we are newly charmed with 
the excellence of its book reviews. Of course it has other features of interest 
— notably the introductory "notes" that give in a genteel way the freshest 
gossip of the aristocracy of letters — but for our part we turn at once to the 
book reviews, for we know that there we can be sure of being at once in- 
structed and entertained. Whoever they are that produce this copy — and 
being anonymous, one has no clue — they deserve rich recompense of cakes 
and wine, and, betimes, a lift in salary, for they do know how to review." 
— Scr anion Tribune. 

THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL 

A Monthly Magazine devoted to Houses and Homes, Articles on Rugs, 
Furniture, Pottery, Silverware, and Bookbindings; Prints, Engravings, and 
Etchings; Interior and Exterior Decoration, etc. Abundantly illustrated. 
It is a magazine of general interest, and appreciative rather than technical 
in character. 10 cents a copy; $1.00 a year. Sample copies sent for five 
two-cent stamps. 

" The House Beautiftil, for its sincerity of purpose and dignified ful- 
filment of its aim, so far, should be highly commended. The third number 
contains some exquisite illustrations. * * Some good reviews and 
notes follow the articles, and a really useful magazine, in a fairway to be- 
come well established, is thus kept on its course." — Chicago Times ■ H e raid . 
" Throughout, this magazine is governed by good taste to a degree which 
is almost unique." — Indianapolis Netvs. 

" There is room for a magazine like The House Beautiful, ^ndtYie^ 
third number of that excellent monthly indicates that the void is in a fair 
way to be filled. In addition to a good assortment of articles on practical 
questions of household art and artisanship, there is a valuable paper by W. 
Irving Way on ' Women and Bookbinding '." — Chicago Tribune. 

" The House Beautiful is the title of the new monthly which deals 
principally with art as applied to industry and the household. * * It 
seems to be a magazine which will have a permanent use and interest." — 
Worcester Spy. 

For sale by all Booksellers and Newsdealers, or will be sent, postpaid, 
by the publishers, on receipt of price. 

HERBERT S. STONE & COMPANY 
Oazton Bldg, Chicago Constable Bldg., New York 



!n!nMM'-n!!ii![i!!imiifiii||j 

IiltHltfiiliOIHttiyf»iil»«01 



Hilt 



lUIUillUlllMlpiMIIIIU 



LIBRARY OF,CONGRESS 

iiiiii!!iii!ii!iitiii;iii!llltllillllUlliltillillllil 



015 907 580 1 



& OTHERS 

BY NORMAN HAPGOOD 



